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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

trauma

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Holding trauma at bay—for now

A red dotted umbrella fills much of the frame. Blurred in the background is a night-time urban scene.
Photo credit: Gabriel Santiago

As I’ve scanned the headlines over the last few weeks, it’s felt like many of us have been holding a canopy just above our heads for a while now. A steady rain of trauma drips and trickles off the edge of the canopy. And there’s a wind blowing just enough rain under the edge to make us damp no matter where we’re standing.

I’ve shared the idea that people express denial when they recognize the stakes and grasp what they have to lose. It’s not a way of dismissing something’s importance, even though it might seem like dismissal. It’s a way of freezing the feelings and staying functional despite absurdity, horror, or anticipated trauma.

It’s completely reasonable. But it stops nothing about life.

This weekend, psychotherapist Martha Crawford shared an article that she wrote last summer and which has special resonance for me now.

Some of Crawford’s clients, she writes, tunnel into the minutiae of their personal relationships, and others burrow into the fine details of public news. In its own way, each group is dodging perceptions and emotions that they’d experience if they ever turned to the other parts of their lives. Through hyper-focus on one life sphere, they try to keep the rain of trauma at bay.

Crawford also shares a harrowing story about an older European in-law who, during the lead-up to World War II, foresaw Jewish persecution and thought seriously about how she might die before it came to her household.

It’s an anxiety I’ve heard from people in the United States ever since November 8. I know some people think it a disproportionate response to the incoming administration, but I’ve heard it from so many people in so many different circumstances that I can’t simply ignore it anymore.

I’m uncertain about what it means that so many people who had the luxury of buying into the US’ exceptionalism myths before last year now feel frightened and vulnerable. I don’t want to be yet another shrill voice adding to communal fear. I also don’t want to underestimate how the next administration’s open plans to decimate the social net, access to healthcare, and civil rights advances will affect people, especially poor people, around the country.

At work just before the holiday weekend, I called the incoming president authoritarian. It’s the most direct I’ve been in my public writing so far; I swore a few weeks ago not to respond to, mention, or retweet his social media posts and I’ve been talking around him ever since.

But it’s hard to know how much of that is a form of denial.

What Martin Luther King called an “inescapable network of mutuality” means that we can’t escape one another. As social creatures, we’re tied together, and so are our respective fates.

There’s no individual thriving while the societies we’re part of corrode, and the toxicity in the social world inevitably becomes part of our personal worlds as well. That’s why we can work on social patterns in interpersonal relationships. It’s also why working on interpersonal relationships isn’t the entire story.

Tonight, I’m sitting with this thought:

We can suppose we are insulated. But we aren’t really. It’s an illusion. We live in community. Our communities affect us like the water we drink, the air we breathe…

This tension of this particular place in time and history is a real psychological force that needs to be tended to and observed. We don’t know whether the tension will dissipate or constellate, and we don’t know how our choices will affect the outcome or how the outcomes will affect us.” —Martha Crawford

What we can know is that we will be mutually affected. I also believe that we’re all mutually responsible for taking action that shapes those effects and not simply waiting to see how things will turn out.

Aaron, brother of Moses, offers up the most ridiculous story when Moses catches him facilitating idolatry while Moses has been on Sinai downloading the Ten Commandments.

“The people gave me the gold,” he says, “and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” (Exodus 32)

Expecting the social realm to re-assemble itself by itself this year would be just as foolish. None of us gets to opt out, and there’s so much work to do.

 

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Copeland: On the value of lives

#NODAPL: Stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Water is life, they tell us. It's true. Image: a raised "power" fist colored in the style of Hokusai.
Illustration: Keisha E. McKenzie

I’m still processing some of the materials I worked through over the last few months to talk about trauma, resilience, nonviolence, and atonement. So I’m still reading Copeland’s work on embodiment and the value of human lives, and it’s echoing for me as I read headline upon headline of more Black death.

Over the weekend in Oklahoma. Today in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose chairman addressed the UN’s Human Rights Council today, still needs support in resisting the Dakota Access pipeline that will cut through Lakota/Dakota sovereign territory if not redirected.

All of these stories have common exploitative DNA and Copeland nails it here:

The new imperial disorder rises arrogantly over the bones of the bodies of conquered children, women, and men. The bodies of the indigenous peoples were the first to be sacrificed, eliminated, and contained; then the body of the earth was raped and mastered; finally, the bodies of yellow, brown, poorwhite [sic], and black children, women, and men, were squeezed through the winepress of ‘new’ empire-building.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being

[Read about the pipeline (pdf) and pitch in by funding the camp. Campers are preparing to stay through winter.]

When we’re convicted of the inherent value of life, we get to stand against every system that makes humans prey and that accommodates the destruction of the Earth.

I see no way to accommodate what’s happening. I can only glimpse a few ways for us to pause and be able to press through, acknowledging the taste of grief, creating regardless, reaching for joy wherever we can enter in, and holding our center.

“Being centered,” John Heider writes, “means having the ability to recover one’s balance, even in the midst of action. A centered person is not subject to passing whims or sudden excitements. Being grounded means being down-to-earth, having gravity or weight. I know where I stand, and I know what I stand for: that’s ground.”

Tonight, I value lives. I listen to music. I write. And I know where we stand.

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Reclaiming the menu

Finely diced carrots and celery in separate piles on a light green plastic cutting sheet. In the top right corner is part of a knife blade.
Cooking is a way to make new memories.
I spent several hours on Thursday being filmed at home for a series of short profiles on US Adventists.

As part of the filming process, I cooked dinner for the filmmakers. So halfway through the afternoon, I chopped up a little onion, celery and carrot, a bunch of collards, and potatoes; I simmered green split peas and marinated potatoes for roasting; and I stirred things every so often in between our conversations and takes around the house.

This meal, sauteed greens, split peas, and pesto-seasoned potatoes, is the same meal I prepared for relatives during a deeply traumatizing visit in Texas six years ago. I hadn’t thought about that visit for a long time until this summer, and not until I was choosing what to prepare for my friends did I realize that I wanted to reclaim that menu.

Yesterday evening, I gathered at my local church with a mixed multitude of friends and friends-to-be. We convene a small group every first Friday for music, conversation, and communion. It’s an experiment in community-building, and we’re discovering that there isn’t much community without food.

The meal many Christians now call the Last Supper happened, according to the gospels, on a Thursday night. The menu included bread and wine, and perhaps lamb and herbs as well; we don’t know for sure.

But within a single generation, that meal of bread and wine had become a community memory rite. The early Church began to explain their shared meal with memories of the death of Jesus, and they reclaimed the menu, using it to symbolize his execution, reconnect with each other, and reinforce the mutual service that characterized their community. What could have remained a simple traumatic memory became a full-sense memorial that the community actively celebrated together. They reclaimed that final meal.

We can rewrite some stories with the help of a few hours cooking and friends to hold space with. We can reconfigure symbols that remind us of challenging memories when we have space to re-enact the storyline and a supportive network to reinforce the new experience with. We can do this for ourselves and in our communities, and it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than greens, peas, and potatoes, or plates of bread and cups of wine.

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Building resilience

"Abundant life: Building resilience, strength, and hope. Keisha E. McKenzie | @mackenzian

I’m speaking about resilience toward the end of this week at a conference in Maryland and have been completing my talk and presentation for the group.

I’ve integrated several sources into my plans for the session and can’t wait to share it. Sources include womanist theology, critiques of conventional “death-surrogate” atonement, personal narratives, self- and community-care strategies, and a wellness audit I’ve used to keep myself grounded over the years.

One of the articles I quote from this time round is a 2014 edited version of an interdisciplinary research panel on resilience. Each researcher in the article has conducted longitudinal studies of populations that have experienced and responded to significant trauma.

Why, these researchers ask, does one person respond to trauma with balance and another develop post-traumatic stress disorder? Why does one person with PTSD recover from it and another struggle life-long? What do these varying responses teach us about what resilience is, what it’s not, and which interventions are helpful?

The article, “Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives,” is available to the public on PubMed and I highly recommend it.

Here’s one of the best anecdotes (CN: democide references):

Minnesota is a refugee destination, where we have had an influx of Cambodian men and women, as well as many other war refugees from around the world. In recent years, we have seen a great many refugees from Eastern Europe and African countries. Observing their trauma symptoms and recovery has influenced my thoughts about resilience (see Masten, 2014b). The Cambodian refugees who came to Minnesota as young people were children when they were exposed to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. In Minnesota, we have one of the largest, if not the largest, concentration of survivors in the United States from that tragic period. Many of these young people would have periodic flare ups of PTSD symptoms. To echo what Dr. Yehuda said, they did not leave their traumatic experiences and symptoms behind, yet I believe everyone would describe them as a remarkably resilient group of people. These were true survivors. When people asked us if we had a comparison group, we could find only one person in our region of the United States who represented a reasonable comparison, because he left Cambodia just before the killings began. That individual was a foot taller than any other person in our sample, likely due to the advantages in nutrition and protein intake he experienced. In other words, the comparison group did not make it out of the ‘killing fields.’ The Minnesota refugees were all survivors, and many of these young people were getting on with their lives.” —Dr. Ann Masten

Sometimes people discuss trauma recovery and imply that the best way to respond is to feel little and change nothing, to dig in and deny impacts. That approach, while very Stoic, is unlikely to help most people, who feel a lot and for whom great pain transforms everything.

With some of my deepest traumas, I’ve learned to practice the principle that some experiences will so disrupt my world that they’ll come to mark the start of the rest of my life. Because of these experiences, I’m changed and I have to change.

Change might mean I handle certain people and relationships differently. It might mean I come into a new relationship with a part of myself that was in shadow until light dawned. And it might mean more simply that I free myself to imagine new futures, set new goals, and meet new people.

What I never want it to mean for me is that my heart hardens against the world and I become rigid or cruel. It happens. I just don’t want it to happen to me.

I now accept that as much as I offer others compassion for their “periodic flare ups of PTSD symptoms,” I also need to offer myself compassion during mine. Self-compassion needs to be every bit as much a part of my wellness routine as the “real food” I insist on eating.

Making mutual compassion standard for all of us could make recovering from traumas and challenging experiences so much easier: when community wellness depends on individual wellness, being well shouldn’t rise or fall on individual grit.

Don’t underestimate the influence of the social.

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CN: The bias of memory

Open books in different shades of white and sepia are tacked to a wall.
Photo credit: Patrick Tomasso

Content note: Genocide.

In 1989, I sat in my family’s kitchen with my father, listening to radio journalists as East and West Germans broke down the wall that had separated neighbor from neighbor, family member from family member.

In 1991, the stock newspaper photo for stories about the Persian Gulf war was an F-15. My brother and I played a flight simulator computer game. My parents fretted about the price of petrol.

From 1991-1995, I came home from school in the afternoons to children’s news shows on the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian conflict between Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats. I learned how to pronounce Srebrenica, Karadžić, Milošević, and Sarajevo. At school, we gossiped about the Los Angeles riots and, later, the O.J. Simpson case.

In 1993, all Adventists would talk about was David Koresh and the Branch Davidians who burned to death in Waco, TX. Some of the dead had once been part of the British Caribbean church circuit I grew up in, and rooms hushed when their names and photos washed up on the other side of the Atlantic. By 1994, Waco had been put to rest, and we learned about the Rwandan genocide. No one told me there were Adventist church leaders among both the murderers and the murdered.

In 1997, I woke up to a frantic TV bulletin about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s car accident in Paris. In 2001, I watched my then-85-year-old grandmother swaying on her feet in Jamaica while New York’s Twin Towers crumbled live on cable TV. She was on the phone with her oldest daughter. They invoked the apocalypse and soon coming of Jesus: it was their only way to make sense of what they were seeing.

The trait common to all but one of these formative childhood memories is trauma. The spin to all but one of them is negative. 

I had a good, safe childhood. And I have lots of great memories, yet almost all of my positive formative memories are private, and almost all of my common memories are negative.

In organizational contexts too, leadership, organizational, and personnel assessments can be like this. We struggle to praise one another and find summing up team accomplishments painful, but we easily notice each other’s errors and evil when it arises.

For years, I’ve insisted that we remember our histories together: Georges Erasmus is right when he describes common national memory as the only viable grounds for a just society.

I just hope that we can train ourselves to tell the truth, and not only the negative truth. I think we need the whole truth at all levels, at the level of persons, organizations, nations, and beyond.

Even when the negative is true, it has to be to our detriment that all we can keep of our past is its shadow.

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Divesting in order to re-invest

When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“

When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving.

The culture of “unfollow, unfriend, and block” tells me that I should demonstrate self-respect by cutting people off. I see that as a possible emergency solution, but not a routine one.

If “we’re one,” cutting others off is like performing a live dissection and more torture than healing. I haven’t learned how to do it well. And I’m not sure that I wish to. I do think we should learn to close relational chapters well, but I don’t think that means carving others out of my life.

So what are my options? (Continuing mistreatment isn’t in the budget.)

"Can't trust everyone you break bread with. Ask Jesus."I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of Jesus; after all, if anyone could speak to inner circle folks becoming life- and joy-threatening liabilities, he’d be the one.

In Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8, Jesus has just called his named disciples and is teaching the public. He has already stressed the Sabbath police, attracted regional crowds, and taught the parable of the sower—which is a parable about being generally accessible yet only selectively received.

Matthew and Luke are vague about Jesus’s family’s intentions, but Mark explicitly says that they’ve come to “take charge of him.” They’ve come to do an intervention, and someone tells him they’ve arrived.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers,” he replies, a little more brusque than a Jamaican parent would have allowed. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).

Given the care with which Jesus engages his mother in his last life chapter, it makes no sense to see this saying as a cold block. It makes a lot more sense to see Jesus destabilizing the sacred definitions of kinship: divesting himself of his relatives so that he can re-invest in them in a new way.

Jesus lays down his parent and siblings so that he can form new kinship relationships that respect what he’s committed to. That new family system includes everyone aligned with his lifework, including his parents and siblings once they can gather themselves and drop the belief that he’s a walking demon-vessel.

It’s not much to ask, really, that your kin stop viewing you through the lens of their suspicion that you’re carrying water for Satan. It’s hard to do a road-trip (and life is one big road trip) with a suspicion that big in the middle seat.

How I’ve heard this saying taught is as permission to dissect a family into believer and unbeliever; into trustworthy and dangerous-and-waiting-to-draw-you-into-moral-deception. 

I don’t see it that way. I see it as encouraging me, us, to reconsider the logic of our relationships, to value our deepest callings and integrity enough to invite those we love to participate with us, to accept their limitations enough to leave them in their lane if that’s what they prefer, and to revise the way we engage them, but not abandon them entirely. After all, our families, our kin, aren’t the only people we serve.

I draw comfort from our glimpses of Jesus’s parent close by at the end of his life, and of his relative James giving his energy to the early church.

We don’t know how long it took them to go from “He is out of his mind” to full-bodied commitment. But they made that journey. And only because Jesus was willing to allow the original relationships to dissolve so that new relationships could form.

I’m learning from the Master.

"Things fall apart. Let them. Because that's not the end of the story." —@mackenzian