Learning to distinguish between discourses and spaces that are trauma-informed and those that are trauma-led may help us all.
A prerequisite to this, of course, is learning to recognize the trauma in us, around us, and in others. Trauma sits lodged in our psyches, shrapnel from battles with natural catastrophes, disease, or the darkest manifestations of individual or collective human behavior. It shifts our perceptions, rises up unpredictably, resides in our physical bodies even if the trauma was purely mental. Trauma is exhausting, maddening,
In order to recognize our trauma, we must first accept that it exists. (I use the word “accept” here not as resignation, but in the Eastern philosophical sense — the antonym of denial.) This is no small thing. I have seen that some people do not want to be associated with trauma; they often describe it as part of a “victimhood narrative” that rewards weakness to the extent that it incentivizes the manufacturing of oppression. The implication of this logic is that in order to be “strong” and factual, one must not be associated with trauma.
But trauma is a scar borne by survivors, not by victims. Accepting that trauma exists means accepting that we have survived something that was so horrific that it destabilized us at a deep level.
