The Politics of Trauma / The Trauma of Politics
Or, Why This Election Has Triggered My Attachment Wounding
Hello dear ones,
This has been a brutal week on top of a brutal year politically. I’ll share more thoughts on this below. But first, I have a few housekeeping matters I’d like to share / discuss with y’all.
The first is that I’ve finished sharing excerpts from my book manuscript, Touch Me, I’m Sick: A Memoir in Essays. I like the idea of doing something special on Friday — though as Rachel reminded me this morning in our co-writing hang, everything I share here is special (thank you Rachel). And so I’m wondering what you’d like to see from me / Friday posts.
I also wanted to share two events that are coming up!
On Sunday, I’ll be taking to the stage to inspire some improv by sharing stories of joy. If you’re in LA, you can drop in live. But if you’re not, you can purchase a ticket to watch virtually!!
And then the following Sunday I’ll be running my workshop “Writing Trauma & the Body.” It’s been a few years since I’ve offered this space, and I’m really looking forward to doing it again.
Join me on Sunday, November 17th from 12-3pm PST via zoom. Tickets are $25-85 with free spots for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
I’ve chosen to not paywall today’s post. But it’s my hope that you’ll consider signing up for a paid subscription. These words are possible because of your support. Every time you sign up for a paid sub, I’m able to gain more financial stability as a writer. If these words have an impact on you, and you have $5 / month to spare (think of it like you’re taking me out for a coffee), I’d be so moved if you helped me get to my goal of 500 paid subs by the end of this year.
The morning after the US Presidential Election, I was walking down Sunset Blvd, in the largely progressive neighbourhood that I call home. I paused when I saw two humans in front of me, staring at a wall, at wheat-pasted posters that read: “Grab the Pussy, Mandate Pregnancy, USA White Christian Nation, All Others Out. Vote Trump.”
When I went to sleep the night before, it was clear that Trump was about to win the election. The following morning, I opened my phone when my alarm went off to confirm. In that moment, I was surprised to not feel shock, or grief, or rage. Instead, what I felt was hope: the belief that me and my queer and trans and disabled kin would continue to exist, because we’ve always done so. While I know that this election has far-reaching consequences on immigrants, people with uteruses, Palestinians, the BIPOC community, and so many other marginalized groups, I believe in our capacity to fight the empire in the name of caring for each and every one of us.
But as I stood and looked at these posters, I began to cry. Grief swelled to the surface. Grief that there are humans in the world with so much hate in their hearts. Grief that there are so many who value power over the safety and dignity of everyone. Grief that their hatred and need for power — both of which, I believe, come from deep, deep trauma (see Resmaa Menakem’s writing in My Grandmother’s Hands) — are going to harm so many. That people will be traumatized and will die because of what they hold in their hearts.
This is why I say that trauma is political. Here, I want to differentiate between traumatic events and trauma. Traumatic events can include rape, war, living in poverty, being incarcerated, having your home destroyed by hurricanes, losing a loved one, and I could go on. While many of these traumatic events are political (rape occurs because we live in a world rife with misogyny, toxic masculinity, and patriarchy), losing a loved one to cancer might not necessarily be political (unless, of course, we’re talking about not having access to life-saving medical care).
Trauma is the body’s response to traumatic events. Not all traumatic events become trauma. Traumatic events become trauma when we don’t have access to the resources we needed to complete the trauma cycle — e.g. move out of fight/flight/freeze and back into a felt sense of safety. We lack of access to culturally competent, trauma-informed therapy. We don’t have humans in our lives who know how to talk to us about our emotions because feelings have been deemed “feminine” and less important than “rational” thought.
My mother’s death from cancer when I was eleven was a traumatic event. But it didn’t have to become trauma. Unfortunately, my father, in the wake of his grief and loss, and having no skills to talk about emotions, was unable to support my brother and I in our grief. None of our extended family showed up in the months and years following to offer us what he couldn’t. Add to this that my mother’s death left him a single parent who, within a year’s time, would begin to experience the symptoms of a rare, slow-moving form of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. With her death, and his disability, we plummeted into poverty.
There’s no way that the aftermath of her death, the trauma that came in the wake, wasn’t political. My father’s lack of emotional capacity came from being raised in the 1950s and 60s, from inheriting the belief that emotions are “women’s work.” Our lack of access to resources is systemic, as was our move into poverty. I cannot think of this individual traumatic event, or my trauma, outside of politics.
The morning after the election, I keep walking, and I notice that something else is happening in my body. I feel unsafe. As a white, cis-assumed person in the world, I know that despite my queerness, the fact that I have a uterus, I’m relatively safe. And, millions of people have voted for a man who is a rapist, who actively wants to take away our right to abortion, who believes that trans people should not exist (and, I could go on). This man, and his politics, are a threat to the safety of anyone who is marginalized.
As I sit with the feeling of unsafety in my body, I reflect on how attachment wounding doesn’t just come from our caregivers. There’s so much attachment trauma that is caused by our government. I’m a human with disorganized attachment, a fun (lolsob) mix of anxious and avoidant strategies. What differentiates disorganized from these two is a very specific experience: those who were supposed to keep us safe were the ones actively causing us harm.
In the landscape of familial relations, this looks like having a parent who is harmful and/or abusive. In the landscape of politics, we’re told that the government’s job is to protect us and our rights. And yet, historically, this isn’t how it works — unless you’re part of the privileged 1%. Again and again, those in charge of the government work to strip away our access to care, to safety. The ongoing COVID pandemic is a great example. Trump’s political platform is another.
Our trauma brain looks for patterns so that it can keep us safe. The day after the election, I see those pro-Trump posters and what my trauma brain sees is a pattern: the person who is “supposed” to protect you actually wants to harm you. You are not safe. Perhaps you are feeling it too: the grief and horror of this present moment, compounded by trauma from the past. That makes so much sense. You’re recognizing a pattern.
And, there are other patterns that we can orient towards. Histories of organizing, of finding underground networks — literally and metaphorically — to keep us safe. Histories of refusing to let those in power take away our joy, of pleasure as resistance. Those histories are my life raft.
The hope that I cling to is that what is happening in the world will create a collective awakening that we cannot turn away from. Is the recognition that trauma is political. We cannot talk about healing our individual trauma without looking at the ways in which the world we live in is deeply traumatizing — and it is this way because people in positions of power make it so.
While it may feel impossible to do anything to change what it is happening, our collective witnessing holds so much more power than we think. We will get through this moment. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be lives lost and more trauma piled on top of trauma. And, our grief is what shows us that a different world is possible. I truly must believe it. It is what keeps me afloat through the grief and hopelessness that come like waves. And I remind myself that we can always choose to move towards healing — individual and collective — that doing so is an act of resistance.
In solidarity and love,
Margeaux