Trauma, its genesis, and unconventional healing
Buckle up, plug in the aux, you are on for a ride.
Theme song: Thinking, thinking wasu na overthinking.
Trauma is the thief of being. How can you be when you were never actualized? To be actualized is to be seen and heard. To not be seen or heard is to be erased. Not physically, but psychologically and spiritually. The erasure of the soul is to be made into a walking dead. Soul death.
While we often downplay the need to be seen and heard. It is the basis of being. We aren’t born with endless possibilities of whom to be but we only express that which is rewarded through sociocultural approval. We learn and internalize the idea of who we are to be from how others respond to our birth and existence.
You bribe God, lucky you. You are born to people who are looking forward to your existence. You don’t, you are maybe born on a rainy Monday to a father who was glad it was a Monday. At least this way work can be an excuse for his absence.
Your mother couldn’t understand how the pregnancy hadn’t brought them closer.
You are a boy. Isn’t that all he has ever wanted? Why then didn’t your arrival bring them closeness and stability? To her, you are a tool of security for their relationship. To him, you are a responsibility and a reminder of permanence. A tie-down.
Your arrival only pushes him further away from the home and her. She is heartbroken. You become her solace. You learn to prioritize her needs and feelings by downplaying yours. You become a good ‘mature’ boy very quickly. Your worthiness as a good boy is however based on how useful you are to her, how quietly you accept her bare minimum parenting, how little attention and love you need from her i.e how little parenting you need.
She is your parent by authority, not responsibility. In your adulthood, you’ve come to understand that you were the one parenting her needs and feelings. She parented your identity, decision-making, and independence. You were parentified via responsibilities while infantilized in authority.
You’ve been low maintenance since. Hyperaware of the needs and feelings of others. The go-to person for everyone. A giver who neither asks nor receives without guilt or the need to return the favor. Giving is how you feel worthy to others. It’s your way of attaching to them. You subconsciously tell yourself that they can’t walk away, not after all you’ve done for them. You are blind to how manipulative your actions are. You can’t possibly see how much of a threat to their autonomy you are. They stay as long as they are needing and fly away when needing to freely exist.
Your parents?
They married too young. Chronologically they were of age. Their souls, however, were merely out of the toddler stage. Neither differentiated nor individuated. Consciously they had found a partner in each other. Subconsciously they were looking for a parent in each other.
She wanted a secure base. One that’s ever-present - signifying love and availability. He wanted one too. One that he can explore away from and safely return to. His presence calmed her. Her need for it agitated his need for autonomy.
He wanted her but not her presence. She wanted closeness and the closer they got the more he wanted distance. You were conceived at the height of their umpteenth anxious-avoidant activation-deactivation dance. Hers being from fear of abandonment. His being from fear of engulfment.
A sympathetic system and amygdala overreactive with fight and flight responses, flooded with glucocorticoids, and an underresponsive parasympathetic system. Physiologically, you were conceived and born into and ready for trauma. An evolutionarily adaptive move if you are living under physically life-threatening trauma. Devolutionary and counter-productive if the trauma is your mother yelling at you or your father walking into the living room.
As they were dancing, your needs became secondary. They were meet if the dance was in rhythm and shamed the further away from rhythm they got. You became hungry for their connection. You became a master at knowing where in the dance they were and adjusting your needs to it.
You learned that the less seen and felt you were, the better. Or that the better you were and predicting and responding to their needs and feelings the more useful and in turn worthy you were. Being attuned to and expressing yourself became a possible threat to a peaceful external existence. You became a swallower of your words. The idea of opening up about your needs and feelings felt and still does feel far too vulnerable. It makes you feel needy and childish. The one time you do express them is followed by shame spirals, attacking yourself, isolating, and distancing. You feel too exposed and contrary to who you were raised to be; someone who takes care of their shit alone and privately.
The trans/intergenerational factor
Back to your parents. They were born at the height of colonialism or its aftermath. To highly irritable parents, whose ways were like those of their colonizers. Whose ways of impacting others were through projective identification. What they didn’t like in themselves is what they saw in those beneath them and sought to correct. They were externalizers of their faults. Their victims internalized their projected sense of weakness and worked hard to correct them. They still are. How do you correct in yourself the faults of others?
Told that their being and ways of life were a source of shame. Their identities became shame-based and while in authority, pride-based. Never based on their souls. While under a master they mastered the art of belittling themselves and existing from a shame-based place.
Home was where they would redeem their pride by exerting authority over others, authoritatively. Not even religion could save them. They read it from a patriarchial-authoritative perspective. Only taking on that which emphasized hierarchical power dynamics and spiritual bypassing.
God became an extension of their masters. A colonialist. A projection of their no-nonsense parents. A scary being eagerly awaiting for them to sin and punish them. Publicly. In ways that guaranteed them a life empty of external validation and filled with shame. No children, no wealth, no big titles, etc. How else would they be deemed worthy while never having met any idealized quality on the socialized trajectory of success?
Your parents were an extension of their parent's identity. Their wins reflected positively on them and especially on the patriarchs of the family. Their failures were internalized as family failures and a source of shame. They were their and their mothers. Who they married, where they lived, their careers, the dress code, their friends, whether they went out or not, were decisions made in regards to how they would make their parents look. Their group identities became far more important than their individual identity and soon they lost access to their sense of individuality. Soul death.
The cycle carried on in every household and family and soon you were born into a shame-based society of ‘what will people say’. It mattered because your identity was built on external factors and validation of your attainment of said external factors. Othered through shame if you fail to meet sociocultural standards or deem yourself to meet them better than the rest of the group. You are to fit in. You became a role self. Another dead soul.
You inherited their trauma. Epigenetically. Uninterrupted you shall also pass it on. Epigenetically.
Who breaks the cycle?
Trauma and politics
Do you think perpetrator trauma and collective guilt are at play in the fact that European and North American governments aren’t calling out Israel?
Also, hurt people hurt people. Abuse kills empathy towards self and others. Empathy, not sympathy.
Can humanness be expected from those who have been dehumanized?
In some scenarios, I think yes, but in most cases the abused eagerly but unconsciously becomes abuser to another. Especially when abused as a group and then repatriated with no conscious healing process.
Where does unprocessed trauma go to? It’s passed on, projected or displaced.
What do Meghan Thee Stallion and President Samia Suluhu have in common? I’ve had dreams that they were my clients…..As a projection of factors, they embody, that I subconsciously or consciously relate to. Probably their ‘I am here to stay and have zero fucks to give’ attitude. An expression of those finally regaining their sense of autonomy and self-worth. Unapologetically taking up spaces and sitting at the tables previously balanced on their backs. A rebellious side to the previously compliant good girl nature. Rather, nurture in this case. An act of rebellion on the journey to liberation won’t hurt anybody.
The daughters they didn’t see coming.
Female rap and the exertion of the self in nontraditional ways.
I love it!
Female rap has always been and will for a while remain a ‘fuck you!’ to the socially conditioned identity of how women are to express themselves and exist. A big fuck you to the Madonna-whore complex. We are every woman! It’s all in us! The whole spectrum, from the Madonna to the whore!
It may be reactive and outside of the window of safety but it's revolutionary. It’s a shake of the table. A step, if not 10, towards the expression of women as multidimensional beings. Especially in that one way we are but aren’t supposed to own up to being, Sexually!
Until next time. Peace and ease.
A good explanation of the baggage we women carry and where it originated from...am glad now we know how to stand for ourselves and fight for what we have envision to be, without the trauma mask.