“You find yourself disillusioned with the irrevocable personal losses: your health, your lover, your job, your hope, your dream. Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.”
Periodic reminder that the Atlanta Braves should change their name to the Atlanta Hammers, bc it would honor Hammerin’ Hank Aaron and also not be racist.
#they could do a dance called the Hammer Jam #instead of the tomahawk chop #it would be so fun!
consciousness is a gift but it is has tricked us into thinking that we can simply will ourselves into higher or otherwise more improved versions of our person through endless introspection. all other creatures in the animal kingdom recognize that change only comes from action…..when a lizard feels sick, they’ll lay in the sun because they know sunlight manufactures much needed nutrients. there is very limited action -> reaction in the darkness of your skull unless it’s in some way informed by the things happening around you, and “growth” being isolated in this way can only serve to endlessly recontextualize thoughts, memories and feelings to the point where they are rendered irrelevant to the reality they were based in. I wrote this paragraph largely just to deliver that lizard fact.
I think the major difference between a social justice and a white/colonial lens on trauma is the assumption that trauma recovery is the reclamation of safety—that safety is a resource that is simply “out there” for the taking and all we need to do is work hard enough at therapy
I was once at a training seminar in Toronto led by a famous (among therapists) & beloved somatic psychologist. She spoke brilliantly. I asked her how healing from trauma was possible for ppl for whom violence & danger are part of everyday life. She said it was not.
Colonial psychology & psychiatry reveal their allegiance to the status quo in their approach to trauma: That resourcing must come from within oneself rather than from the collective. That trauma recovery is feeling safe in society, when in fact society is the source of trauma
Colonial somatics & psychotherapies teach that the body must relearn to perceive safety. But the bodies of the oppressed are rightly interpreting danger. Our triggers & explosive rage, our dissociation & perfect submission are in fact skills that have kept us alive
the somatics of social justice cannot (i believe) be a somatics rooted in the colonial frameworks of psychology, psychiatry, or other models linked to the dominance of the nation-state (psychology was not always this way, but has become increasingly so over time)
the somatics of social justice cannot be aimed at restoring the body to a state of homeostasis/neutrality. we must be careful of popular languaging such as the “regulation” of nervous system & emotion, which implies the control and domination of mind over emotion & sensation
bc we are not, in the end, preparing the body to “return” to the general safety of society (this would be gaslighting). we are preparing the body, essentially for struggle—training for better survival & the ability to experience joy in the midst of great danger
in the cauldron of social justice healing praxis, we must aim for relationality that has the potential to generate social change, to generate insurrection. we must be prepared to challenge norms. acknowledge danger. embrace struggle. take risks.
& above all, we must not overemphasize the importance of individual work (which is important indeed) to the detriment of a somatics that also prepares us, essentially, for war. somatics that allow us to organize together. fight together. live together. love each other.
I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.
“Kracha worked [in the steel mill] from six to six, seven
days a week, one week on day turn, one week on night. The constant shifting of
turns made settlement into an energy-saving routine impossible; just when he
was getting used to sleeping at night he had to learn to sleep during the day.
At the end of each day-turn week came the long turn of twenty-four hours, when
he went into the mill Sunday morning at six and worked continuously until
Monday morning. Then home to wash, eat and sleep until five that afternoon,
when he got up and returned to the mill to begin his night-turn week. The long
turn was bad but this first night turn coming on its heels was worse. Tempers
flared easily; men fought over a shovel or a look and it was fatally easy to be
careless, to blunder.
“When work was good, when one full week followed another with
little besides paydays to break their monotony, Kracha lived only during his
day-turn weeks. Night-turn weeks were periods of mental fog; he went back and
forth to the mill in half a daze which lasted until the end of his turn Sunday
morning, when he was given twenty-four hours to himself. Sometimes he went to
early mass; other times he went directly home and rolled into bed. When he rose
late that afternoon there was little time to do anything. Usually he got drunk.
Only whiskey could pierce the shell of his weariness, warm him, make him think
well of himself and his world again.
“Hope sustained him, as it sustained them all; hope and the
human tendency to feel that, dreadful though one’s circumstances might be at
the moment, there were depths of misfortune still unplumbed beneath one, there
were people much worse off; in fact, what with a steady job in the blast
furnaces, a cozy home on the cinder dump, a friend like Dubik here and a dollar
to slap down on Wold’s bar of a Saturday night, one was as well-favored a man
as could be found in the First Ward. And there was always hope, the hope of
saving enough money to go back in triumph to the old country, of buying a farm
back in the hills, of going into business for one’s self.
“For a few their hopes were not in vain. To others work and
hope alike came to a sudden, unreasonable end when they were carried – if machinery
or molten metal had left anything to be carried – out of the mill feet-first.
The greater part went on from day to day feeling that all this was only
temporary since such things couldn’t last, that just before human flesh and
blood could stand no more something would happen to change everything for the
better.
“But it never did. When human flesh and blood could stand no
more it got up at five in the morning as usual and put on its work clothes and
went into the mill; and when the whistle blew it came home.”
–Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace: a Novel of Immigrant Labor in America
