Personal Trauma, Collective Trauma, Religion, and Politics

If you read that headline and still clicked on the blog – THANK YOU. That took guts.

Also, if you’re someone who thinks that overturning Roe V Wade was actually a moral victory and a giant step forward for this country, please don’t click away. This post is about so much more than reproductive rights, privacy rights, and freedom of religion. This is really a post about trauma. I am pro-choice. I believe in the freedom to choose not only what we do with our bodies in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of medicine in general. I believe in the freedom to choose when, where, and how to worship G-d (or not at all.) I respect your opinion and your way of life. That’s what pro-choice means to me. I promise not to put down your beliefs. I don’t promise you won’t feel challenged by mine. In fact, I hope everyone who reads this feels challenged by something. Otherwise, I’m not doing my job as a coach very well.

There is a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing happening these days. A lot of battening down the hatches on one side or another. Why wouldn’t there be? The SCOTUS decision last Friday was one more nail in the coffin. To many of us, it feels like the biggest nail, but honestly, it’s just another nail. All of the ones before were just as devastating.

So why this sense of escalation and impending doom?

Because it’s ANOTHER NAIL. How many more before we can’t get the lid off?

That’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it?

And here is the trauma.

The trauma response is something that was built into our physiology to protect us from things that are too much. In many ways, it is a gift of protection. Think about living in a war zone. This is “big T” Trauma. Your life is really in danger. Your family’s lives are really in danger. It’s unknown. The idea of safety is completely gone, and nobody can tell you when this will end. So, our bodies have this great gift of numbing out the parts that are too much. Our brains just say, “I can’t deal with this right now. Let’s set it aside until later.” Sometimes we remember to go back and deal with that thing, and sometimes it becomes an unconscious pattern that plays in the background throughout our lives.

And then things get interesting…

Research studies have shown that a trauma response can be genetically passed down to the next generation. A male mouse that has been shocked every time it smells a certain smell will learn to fear that smell. The offspring of that mouse will have that same fear for two generations. Even if they've never encountered the smell before.

Humans have a history of trauma - the crusades, colonization, slavery, witch hunts, the holocaust, wars, genocide, etc. All of this “history” is still playing out inside each of us. It’s been there so long we aren’t even aware of it.

Regardless of what history you carry in you – whatever side of the incident it was on – it will impact your life until it is healed. And because we are all walking around with this history embedded in us, it is embedded in our society. Thomas Huebl said that until we become aware of the pieces of ourselves frozen in the past, the past will continue to repeat itself.

From time to time, politicians leverage this and take advantage of people. They play on fears. They depend on the trauma response to allow them to gain or maintain power.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like the world is growing more and more chaotic. The news cycles are getting shorter because it’s just one thing after another, and we all feel so exhausted from it all.

Here we are with yet another layer of trauma being exposed by the SCOTUS decisions in the last few days. People around the world are reacting to this. It’s triggering things in all of us.

Here’s how I think I can be the most helpful:

In High Performance Coaching, we talk about raising necessity. It’s a critical step in every habit we create. If it’s not important enough, you won’t do it. This is why allies don’t always show up as well as the people we support want us to… because our sense of necessity doesn’t completely align with theirs.

This attack on reproductive rights FEELS like it has raised necessity on a bigger scale. Just like those kids in Uvalde did for gun control. (yes, that statement is fraught with white privilege, but it’s also the truth about that conversation for the moment.)

So why am I having so much trouble acting?

I don’t want to go to a rally because I know that my response to crowds, anger, and violence is usually an escalation. On the one hand that’s wisdom. On the other hand, I figured this out a year ago and have done nothing to learn how to NOT escalate so that I CAN attend rallies.

I’ve been looking for opportunities online, but I have not picked up the phone.

In fact, I’m having trouble working, and I’m having trouble creating content.

Then it hit me:

Right next to this increased necessity, I find myself sitting in a FREEZE state. I am so afraid of how we got here and where we may be going, that I can’t act. Logically, I can look at the situation and see what steps I could take, but underneath that, I have my personal fears.

I saw so much possibility when the pandemic hit. This horribly divided political body would finally have a common enemy to come together against – like the aliens in INDEPENDENCE DAY. We had a real-time, physical example of how intricately connected we are, and of how taking care of you is also taking care of me. Instead, we got more divided. Then we got even more divided along race lines, and religious lines, and the division has been widening, and nothing seems to stop it.

Underneath THAT, I have the fears of all the people who came before me. The women old enough to remember life before Roe. The memories of my ancestors who lived through pogroms. Stories from the holocaust. The memories of generations of women persecuted as witches. It’s all in there. So much “us v them,” so much scarcity, so much anger, fear, and distrust.

So much trauma.

As I search for organizations to align myself with, I am cautious of their rhetoric. Yes, we are angry. Yes, we have a reason to be angry. Yes, anger is the fire that can light a spark of change. But when have I ever acted from anger and had it go well? When has amplifying each other’s anger ever led to resolution?

This chaos and anger is an awakening. We need to leverage it to get out of this numbness and paralysis. But I think we need to work THROUGH the anger. It needs to be the log that fuels the fire, not the fire itself.

We need a new model.

The current either/or binary isn’t working. (Is it possible that so many people with nonbinary genders are on the planet right now because they have something to teach us beyond gender? That’s a whole other post, I think.)

There are too many broken pieces that are critically urgent.

I think we need a multi-pronged approach.

Whatever your issue is – the environment, reproductive rights, civil rights, gender equality, separation of church and state, the rising costs of everything and the disappearance of the middle class, student debt, gun control… any or all of these, and everything I missed – whatever your issue, we need to approach a solution from the top-down and the bottom-up. We need to change from within the current system, even as we seek to develop a new system. We need to do the things individually that will bring about small changes, and work with organizations that make a bigger change.

We need to do the active work in the world.

AND

We need to do the quiet work in ourselves.

We need to heal our own trauma – with the guidance of someone who is trained to help. We need to do the personal work with the goal that it will open up possibilities in the collective.

I’m not saying sit around and visualize the perfect world and that’s enough. I’m saying that it’s equally not enough to protest, vote, organize, etc. without also doing this work.

We can’t take our trauma into the solution.

The world has been screaming at us for over a decade. The conflicts among humans have been increasing. The conflicts between humans and the natural world have been increasing. We are seeing so much more all-or-nothing thinking.

It’s all rolled up into fear and trauma.

The good news is that this chaos is a sign that we are moving out of numbness toward something else. The other good news is that there are a lot of issues and a lot of people, so no one person has to solve all of them. Go to the one that matters most to you. Do your inner and outer work there.

We need to shift the paradigm. We must bring something different to the game. Maybe it’s brand new, maybe it’s ancient. The work will show the way.