Trauma responses to oppression

Content note: I am not a mental health professional. I am a disability activist and academic; I have experienced trauma. This post is a contextualisation of what I understand of oppression-based trauma from my experiences of it. This post contains descriptions of trauma responses - fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

The Responses

Fight

Incensed. There's sparks at the tips of your temples that force you to clench your glutes. You yell. It's not about what you want, it's about what was done to you. Consequences? What consequences? This is about justice! And there is none to be had. Nobody has your back. If you could scream so loud the entire universe could hear, it would not be enough, there are people in the world who hurt you and they continue to be allowed to exist. How dare they. How dare the people around them. Can't they see you're in pain? This awful, sharp and all consuming pain that takes over your entire body and still somehow that isn't enough to contain it all; how does anyone expect you to carry this pain? It's pain that someone else couldn't carry, and dumped on you. But it's still too much, you can't carry it, and people are trying to dump even more pain on you and you're not having it. They can keep this shit they're trying to give you, and take some of your stuff as well for good measure. "Fuck you! Get out of my face!" you yell, pushing the person with all the force you can muster.

Flight

Afraid. You don't want to respond to this person, and you wish they did not expect it. You shrink yourself to hide away, minimising the surface area on your body exposed to the world (and specifically, exposed to the attacker). You look for a way out. A distraction, an escape hatch, a curtain to hide away. Somewhere nobody will find you because they won't think to look. You might be safe there, and possibly from more than just this attacker. The world is looking at you, judging you as unworthy and nothing will change their minds about that. There's a hole in your chest where your heart should be, and it's threatening to collapse your whole body into itself. You make an excuse and leave, because collapsing here would be undignified, and give your judges even more cause to demean you. The next time, you avoid going to the place where you met that person, because you don't want to have to see them again.

Freeze

Numb. You're not sure what's going on, and you're hard pressed to be able to articulate a thought or a feeling. You wish you weren't here, and your brain has somehow complied by disconnecting you. You no longer feel or understand agency, and any power you ever had seems inaccessible in this moment. Perhaps you're staring into space, unaware that you're not really looking at anything. Whatever you're thinking about, it isn't this person in front of you, the place you're at, or even what you came here to do. All of that seems strangely out of place, a snapshot of some kind of cinema-reel that you're supposed to be in, but isn't there. It's a mirage. There's a coldness to your fingertips that may have felt like a freeze-burn, if you could at all feel. Eventually you shake out of it, and try to find your way back to where you were and what you were doing. "Where was I?" you ask, the moment buried deep in your body until called on again.

Fawn

Tired. You have done this before, and you've learnt that diffusing is the path of least resistance you have available. It's a bomb, threatening to hurt you, and you cannot afford the time off you would need to heal from that. Fighting back just raises the threat levels, and you don't really want to give them cause to think you weak, even though you don't have any energy left in your bones. Your shoulders droop, and any life you had slips away from your feet into some unknown corner that is no longer yours. You've prepared for this moment through trial and error; you know what works, what works better, and what hits you back harder, because this has been done to you over and over. You mechanically follow the script, hoping that it's enough to appease the threat into retreating. That's all you have the capacity to do anymore. You crack a joke, and your attacker laughs without you. They say you're a good sport.

The Trauma

Fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Trauma responses that are wired into our systems. While these are the ones we are aware of, it has taken us some time to recognise them: what was earlier "fight or flight" has now expanded to include freeze and fawn; it may be that we recognise others in the future as well (Fidget? Fester? who knows). If any of this sounds familiar, you've probably dealt with some kind of trauma in your life. If you find it familiar, but tell me that it's in response to some kind of microaggression you've (possibly repeatedly) experienced, do remember that oppression is traumatic^[1]. The experience of marginalisation is the experience of constant and repeated othering or devaluation, from which there is little or no escape. It is constant reminders that we are not a part of the tribe, that we are 'other', and that we cannot expect to be protected, should we ever need help. People have documented the traumatic nature of oppression, whether disableist^[2], racial^[3], casteist^[4], gendered^[5], or others. Trauma is usually understood as any experience causing fear, distress, or helplessness that is outside our control resulting in long-term (negative) impacts on functioning, behaviour or attitudes of the person experiencing it. For many of us experiencing marginalisation, the discrimination and harassment we deal with on a regular basis often qualifies. Trauma is often a result of lack of support or resources: the same event may/may not be experienced as traumatic depending on the person experiencing it and their access to support/resources.^[6]

This teaches us that we are not safe, that we need to be alert to lions in the vicinity because we don't have people to help us out. We can't rely on the night-watchers to alert us to lions when we sleep, because, as we are constantly reminded, this is not our place. We sleep fitfully, as a consequence, because the lions could come and attack us if we actually rest. We get nightmares in our sleep, because we need to constantly wake up to make sure we stay alert to danger and do not get killed. We try our best to fit in with the people around us, pretending to be like others, blending in where we can and hiding away if we cannot, so that people mistake us to be a part of the group and show us that they will be with us when the lions come. That they will not abandon us. Sometimes, we find other people like us, who also feel terrified that we're all going to be abandoned. Sometimes there's enough of us that we start to feel a sense of belongingness, and form our own little sub-tribe. Sometimes there just aren't, and we're left to try searching for others like us, in the hopes of finding safety from the lions. Sometimes the people aren't entirely like us, we end up having to hide little bits of ourselves to feel some sense of belongingness with those who are somewhat (but not entirely) like us, and replicate patterns of power and othering for the ways in which we are different. We lose energy to this, getting neither rest nor support, and end up burning ourselves out simply trying to survive.

Responding to Trauma

Notice the header here is 'responding', rather than healing, curing, or getting over one's trauma. Fundamentally, I'm not entirely sure that 'healing' is an actually feasible option for many of us in the context of trauma rooted in oppression. One of the main goals of therapeutic support for traumatised people is to re-establish a sense of safety and trust in the world. This is a ridiculous proposition for someone traumatised by systemic oppression, explicitly because we are not truly safe while the oppressive systems persist. Asking people who regularly deal with harassment every time they step out of the home to 'trust' that strangers are good is to actively gaslight us about our safety.^[7] This framing misunderstands systemic oppression entirely, reducing it to a question of 'bad individuals' that are not the norm, or worse, resorting to some form of essentialism that entrenches constructed hierarchies instead of demolishing them. While individuals are responsible and ought to be held accountable for harm done to others, until our world significantly shifts to undo oppressive hierarchies and make accountability for harm the norm, safety is a mirage. Our claims of ongoing unsafety are not 'victim mentality' or 'paranoia', but accurate reflections of our position in an oppressive society.

Collectively, we need to stop assuming that there are 'therapeutic' or 'medical' ways of healing trauma without first addressing the systemic violence that causes it. Systemic oppression operates at individual, institutional and cultural spheres making itself inescapable. Expecting us to bear the responsibility of crafting our own safety within such a system places a triple-burden on us to first resist the harmful impacts of oppression on us, second, do the work of undoing it, and third, do so from a position of powerlessness. Therapy with the goal of easing the symptoms of trauma we experience (whether these look like pain, hypervigilance, avoidance, or negative views of the world) is to attempt to give us pain killers (and sometimes, help with the fracture). However, this often happens without understanding that there are people regularly hitting us with hammers repeatedly causing these fractures. Therapy also does little to nothing to stop this from happening. Sometimes, really bad therapy may try to convince us that there are no hammers, and that we should stop anticipating or worrying about these attacks.

What is then left for those of us who are traumatised? How should we respond to these repeated attacks? One of the few things left for us to do is to resist as much as we can. Finding ways to build resistance against traumatising systems is one of the best ways of finding communities and support against the impact of the system itself. This is, however, a response to the external conditions that produce trauma, rather than a response to the trauma. Assuming that this is already true, and that we're already doing what we can to stop systems from being traumatising, how do we deal with the trauma already on us?

This is where the response to trauma becomes both collective and personal. It's collective, because no single one of us can have all the answers. What works for one person may well make another feel much worse, because the nature of trauma is personal and incomparable. It is collective because there's a dearth of resources for people to find support on oppressive trauma, and all of us need to choose to contribute what we can to improving access to everyone. It is collective in the sense of this post being an invitation to anyone who has experienced trauma or learned ways that work for you to respond to trauma to share this as a resource to others who come after. It is collective in that it understands modern therapeutic support as woefully inadequate, being constructed within and for an individualistic and hierarchical society that is actively harmful to us and seeks alternative ways of being that do not endorse adapting or succumbing to oppressive systems. It is collective in that it requires collective effort to undo the impacts of oppression. It is also collective, possibly most importantly, in that a lot of the things that traumatised people need to process and heal the trauma is often collective support, whether in the form of emotional, physical, material or spiritual support from others in doing the work that needs to be done.

At the same time, it is also personal: anything I say about how I experience and respond to trauma is ultimately just that: my experiences. It may give you ideas on how to be, or make you feel disgusted with me, because you cannot stand doing what I do. That's okay. There is no one answer, and while I hope that others dealing with some of the same or similar things as me can find a sense of solidarity, company and support in the things that help me, I expect it will not be so for everyone, and that's a good thing. We are not the same, and it is good to acknowledge that differences exist. It may also be that I hear from others on what they do and that changes what I do as well.

What I'm Doing

One of the biggest shifts in my own journey has been to accept that the trauma exists. This is not "accepting" that what happened was okay, or justifying the existence of systemic and traumatic abuse, but to cease fighting the reality that my body was hurt and is in pain from it. It is to let go of my attachment to a world or a life where I was not traumatised, or the actions that caused it did not happen. It is a shift away from the frame of mind "How is it fair that this happened?" because while it was obviously not fair, that doesn't change the fact that it happened, desiring alternative/better experiences that could have been doesn't help, because it is still an escape or denial of the world I'm in. It is a shift into the frame that asks of my being, "What do you need, given that this happened?"

Once there, I try to find ways to provide for what I need. Do I need company in feeling whatever I'm feeling? If so, I seek non-judgemental listening. Do I need validation that what I'm feeling is ok? I try to allow myself to feel without judging or prescribing how I ought to feel. Do I need to express my feelings? I tune in to what my body needs to do to express these feelings, and allow that to happen. A surprisingly difficult part of this practice is to stop judging my feelings. Often there are conflicting thoughts on how I should be feeling about a thing (eg. am I angry with someone I think doesn't deserve blame? Am I feeling relief where I should be feeling sadness?) These thoughts tend to prevent me from actually moving through whatever I'm feeling, acting as barriers to the embodied senses by attaching shame to the feeling. Unhelpfully, that makes it worse, by preventing me from accepting my feelings as morally neutral (feelings are morally neutral, but how we act on them is not). However, while many people understand this to mean "I shouldn't act on feelings like anger" and end up repressing anger, I have found it more helpful to actually express it, and allow myself to "act" on feelings in ways that actually help me move through, and thereby past, them.

Allowing my feelings to exist enables me to decide whether or not acting on them is worthwhile, and understand any moral implications of such acts. It also gives me the option of holding, acknowledging and expressing my feelings in ways that are constructive. I've come to see my anger as being an indicator of pain that I am not safe enough to feel. This doesn't mean that the anger should not exist, it just means that there's more to it than just the anger. I allow myself to express the anger (examples include punching pillows, yelling at walls, stabbing paint onto canvas, writing, tearing up what I write) while taking care to ensure that the expression is not happening to or at anyone who could be harmed by it. This doesn't mean never expressing anger to those who deserve it; it merely enables me to choose when and how I do. Expressing anger mindfully (or more mindfully than the fight response) usually allows for feeling pain at the heart of it (yes, I know, great, more feelings). With pain, it's similar: find space to express and hold the pain, with support or breaking it up into tiny manageable chunks if required.

But that's Exhausting

Exactly. It is exactly as exhausting as dealing with oppression ought to be. It's even worse to avoid this pain and exhaustion because that merely leads to even more pain when we have to feel it. Imagine having an accident, breaking a bunch of bones, and needing to go through with the process of healing from this. It requires resting the broken bones, to the point where we're often put in splints to prevent us from accidentally using the limb and preventing it from recovering properly. Why should emotional pain be any different?

Increasingly, we are coming to understand the bodymind as an integrated and unified whole. If recovering from emotional trauma is exhausting, we need to rest our bodies. This is also one of the key ways in which responding to trauma is a collective task: many of us do not have the support systems we need to take the rest we need. Providing us with support—including for rest—is a big part of the collective task of responding to and undoing trauma. This would be the takeaway for all of us, traumatised/oppressed or not: making space for each other to feel our pain is worthwhile. Real support and space to do this requires work as a means to the end of having resources to survive needs to be dismantled, along with our personal attachment to constantly working in order to feel productive/valuable in society.^[8] The full challenge to our systems of work is another story entirely. For now, suffice to say that we all need more space, time, and support in order to actually allow our bodies to work through historical harms than we are afforded.