Younglings, Gun Violence, and Trauma Healing

[Warning: OBI-WAN KENOBI episode 1 spoilers in paragraph 2]

We couldn’t wait to watch the first episode of the new Star Wars series. I think we’d been waiting for months. Obi-Wan Kenobi may have been my first spiritual teacher, and I just could not wait for this show.

In the first five minutes, a Jedi temple was attacked. And it wasn’t Jedis fighting back – it was a teacher, running away with her class of small children. Ducking and hiding from (laser) gunfire.

I started to cry. I tried to hold it back, but it kept getting worse. I finally told Rich to turn off the show. I couldn’t take it.

I cried for a good 10 minutes. The only thought in my head was the faces of the students and teachers in Uvalde. I couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t think of anything other than how scared those teachers must have been, how terrified the children were, and how hollow their families have been left.

When I was done crying, I was angry.

Why did we need to see the Padawans? Why couldn’t they have shown us that younglings were present and then skipped to a battle scene between two sides of trained warriors? We could have filled in the plot points that were being so vaguely hinted at. We didn’t need that scene. Kids don’t need to see it (and they will). Violence against children has become so commonplace that even Disney puts it on TV without thinking about it.

Eventually, we started watching again. When the show was over, we talked about shock value in entertainment, and how numbing the media has become.

I haven’t posted anything about the recent string of massacres. (There have been at least 20 since Buffalo and Uvalde.) It’s been too much for me. More importantly, I didn’t have anything constructive to say. I needed time to be with and observe my feelings. I needed to allow those feelings the space to be felt before they could be shared. I am still feeling a lot of things. Fear, sadness, anger, ... the top-most feeling is grief - multi-layered, convoluted, nearly ineffable - grief.

Though I’m thousands of miles away from these tragedies, I share in the trauma of what happened.

We all do.

What do we do with it?

Most importantly, we need to recognize and address the trauma. We need to acknowledge it exists personally and collectively. We need to find people who can help us integrate the emotions that go with that trauma. We need to do the individual work so that we can join in the collective work without adding trauma on top of trauma.

Any time we see two camps that are diametrically opposed to each other’s point of view, it’s a good guess there is trauma involved. That’s what we are seeing right now in response to these tragedies. One side digs in and says, “it’s not the guns.” The other side digs in and says, “get rid of the guns.” Sound bites become memes, which become a way to avoid how we really feel while triggering someone else. No side can hear each other clearly because both sides are feeling too much emotion – much of which they may be completely unaware of.

My guess is that the NRA is full of people who are either feeling conflicted or are so dissociated from their feelings that they don’t even know what they’ve buried. There is pain on all sides, and it all needs to be healed. None of us are any good to everyone else until we do our own work. This is especially true with trauma around violence. We can’t stop any kind of violence if we ourselves may become aggressive in the process.

We must do our own work first.

What does that look like?

It looks like sharing your feelings with your family and friends, writing in a journal, or working with a trauma-informed therapist and/or trauma-informed coach. It involves learning techniques to feel safe integrating your emotions.

While you’re doing that work, maybe there are things you can do that you know won’t trigger over-reactions – like researching the issues, signing petitions, developing a plan for what kinds of actions you feel safe taking, finding groups to work with so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Working through trauma is multi-layered, and life is complex. The things that need to heal may overlap. You may find that your concerns about the environment, COVID, or personal rights may surprisingly intersect with your concerns about gun violence. You may find that there are layers that aren’t yours personally. It takes time and courage.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to happen all at once, and there are no rules about what should happen first. You can act while you heal, and you can heal through acting. The key is to remember that all of it is needed.

The problem of gun violence is not simply access to guns or certain types of guns. It’s not simply a mental health problem. It will not be solved by legislation alone. (California has the strictest gun laws in the country, and we still have an average of one mass shooting a week.*)

We all agree that something must be done, but without a focus on healing the trauma around the issue, the struggle to find real solutions will continue.

If you’d like some resources about working with trauma, drop me a note. I’m happy to help point you in the right direction.

*Source: https://www.ppic.org/blog/mass-shootings-in-california/