Listen to this
For some time now I have been troubled by the mainstream psychological approach to trauma and the way it has infiltrated itself into CYC. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t believe in trauma or its effects. I am very aware of how painful and horrific events can have an impact on human beings in deep and profound ways. In my work and my life, I have certainly seen trauma up close and personal and have had to manage it, both as a CYC worker and as a person in relationship with other people.
The effect of painful and horrific events has been made plain to me over the years. Seeing the amount of suffering that we inflict on one another and the devastation that can be caused by natural disasters, disease and so forth has had a significant impact on how I see the world. At times it can drive me to despair and other times to a profound belief in the resilience of life and humanity. So, trauma is for me an important and inevitable part of life. What troubles me is not trauma per se, but the mainstream psychological approach to trauma which has become so ubiquitous across so much of our contemporary culture.
What troubles me about the psychological approach to trauma is the same thing that bothers me about any set of truth claims. It is the certainty that surrounds the claims about what trauma is, and how it should be dealt with. It is the cadre of experts who now travel the world administering the proscribed treatments for those traumatized by life events. It is the surety that when we say trauma informed care, we know exactly what we mean by care and by trauma. The universal application of both terms troubles me because it has the capacity to overwhelm and shove aside other ways of understanding pain and suffering, as well as how such pain and suffering might be managed.
For me this kind of psychological approach engages the same kind of dangerous discourse as any other colonial missionary activity. Such an approach accentuates the supposed superiority of western colonial psychology over the thousands of years that other cultures have been managing pain and suffering without the well-intentioned intervention of social workers and psychologists. In the book Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche Ethan Watters argues that whatever pain and suffering we experience as the result of trauma, our response is rooted in cultural beliefs and stories that we use to understand what is happening to us. Mental distress and suffering is always “a local and intimate phenomenon.”
CYC with its roots in humanism and humanistic psychology has large theoretical and practice investments in local and intimate understandings of what it means to be a human being. No one’s experience of any emotional or psychological phenomenon is generalizable. What each of us experiences is unique and profoundly personal. When we generalize our understandings of powerful experiences such as trauma and situate them in instrumental understandings and templates for care, we are disrespecting the value of everyone’s experience and the possibility that we have unanticipated resources for responding to pain and suffering. If we are to take the admonition, so frequently repeated across all the helping professions, that we should meet the client where they are at, then we should seriously investigate the particulars of their location before overlaying a predetermined map on their experience. This idiosyncratic mapping of our encounter with each other is what Solution Focused and Strength Based approaches require at a minimum. To truly understand the strengths that each of brings to challenging circumstances, we need to be able to recognize that strength looks different for each of us.
It is important to understand that suffering is initially rooted in the body and as such is inarticulate. We feel before we can describe the feeling we are having. The suffering body is situated in a complex ecology of corporeal experience and complex ecologies of language. The language that we use to describe the experiences of the body has evolved in very particular cultural ecologies. The variations of description among different peoples and geographies is rich and complex. It is nuanced by the ways communities have come to know and understand suffering. For each of us who suffer, the task is to find a language in which we can express our pain that resonates for us. In a sense, our ability to make sense of our pain and suffering is deeply rooted in our cultural history as a means for understanding the world and our place in it.
The emotional and psychological ecology in which we are situated is unique and has evolved over millennia to provide a way to describe our pain and practices designed to alleviate suffering. These cultural psycho-social ecologies are rich in resources for managing and resolving trauma. Like the physical ecologies that make up the natural world, they rely on particular historically and geographically unique components to function. The more diverse the elements in the ecology, the more resilient it will be. When the complexities of ecologies are reduced, the capacity for resilience is also reduced. In his work on global psychological responses to trauma. As Watters states,
We should worry about a loss in diversity in the world’s differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness in exactly the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity in nature. Modes of healing and culturally specific beliefs about how to achieve mental health can be lost to humanity with the grim finality of an animal or plant lapsing into extinction. (p. 7)
The loss of cultural and social complexity is a tremendous waste of human possibility and capacity for healing. It also signals the kind of colonial blindness and arrogance that we have seen before in the literal evisceration of customs, languages, and ceremonies. Although there are some today who continue to defend the European colonial project, the brutality and savagery perpetuated on colonized peoples was unconscionable. The fact that, in many respects, that same brutality is a hallmark of contemporary global capitalism is profoundly disturbing. Fortunately, there continue to be culture holders who resist the loss of thousands of years of spiritual and social development. The struggle is ongoing but every bit as crucial to all of our survival on the planet as any form of environmental activism of behalf of other animals, plants, and geographies.
In his debate with Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault makes the argument that some of the most dangerous fascistic structures in society are those that are marked as benevolent. The structures that capitalism has developed to discipline and control often appear as institutions designed to help us. Colonized people have recognized this since the inception of colonization and capitalism. Institutions such as the church, schools, and child welfare programs contain significantly corrosive practices to traditional indigenous culture and ways of life. Each of these social institutions is designed to overcode and corrupt indigenous language, spirituality, and social relations.
And yet, each of these systems is presented in the dominant culture as desirable and benevolent. They are systems described as caring. But, as an indigenous friend of mine once remarked at the beginning of the school year, the first day of pre-school is a day of mourning for many indigenous parents because it is the beginning of a life-long struggle over which set of values young people will adopt for themselves and future generations.
Certainly, one of the most powerful and pernicious systems of care that has been developed by colonial capitalism, as it has evolved since the early 20th century, is the Euro-American derived disciplines that comprise social services. This system of care has been complicit in a multitude of actions hostile to indigenous autonomy at all levels. While this has been somewhat acknowledged by statements of apology over historically racist practices by psychological, psychiatric, and social work associations, practice still lags. Ethics codes similarly have been updated to include statements about cultural sensitivity and equitable practice, but again there remains a blind spot when it comes to applying Euro-American psychological templates across cultures.
Given the strength and pervasiveness of psychological ideas in CYC these days, this should be of considerable concern to all of us working with young people, their families, and communities. If it is true that applying Euro-American psychological concepts across cultures around the world has devastating impacts on local knowledges and healing, then such a practice is inherently unethical. And yet we spread these ideas with great fervor in CYC workshops and university training programs as though they were singularly true. We use frameworks of diagnosis and treatment derived from psychology and psychiatry and call them best practices and valorize them as evidence based. We do this almost reflexively, without thinking about what the impact is on other ways of knowing and healing.
Not all essential cultural practices lend themselves to western empiricism. Science as practiced in the social science disciplines is a peculiar and particular way of producing proof. To subject non-Euro-American ways of knowing to the template of western empirical study is in itself an act of cultural imperialism. Evidence based proof is culturally bound and biased to a worldview premised in Euro-American philosophies deeply implicated in colonization and capitalist logic.
The very framework of what constitutes the success of an intervention is highly biased by western colonial values. It assumes a subject adequately inducted into the conventions and modes of subjectivity amenable to capitalism as it is emerging today. Often, such a subject is an individual whose well-being is tied to the capacity to act by themselves and for themselves. The western psychological subject that sets the parameters for evidenced based success is expected to have a normative sense of what feels wrong, out of balance, discomfiting, emotionally distressing, and so on. A subject who does not share these psycho-emotional responses to the world is marked out as abnormal and in need of assistance. And by assistance we mean cultural assimilation into conventional ways of feeling and expressing those feelings.
Certainly, this is true of trauma. Psychology has set out evidenced based criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that include avoidance, numbness, and hyperarousal. These symptoms are based on research normed on largely American subjects but are applied around the world wherever a traumatic event has occurred without regard to local expectations or practices for managing trauma. As soon as a significant traumatic event occurs that has population level impacts, western trauma experts arrive on the scene to educate those impacted in best practices founded in Euro-American psychology.
In Watter’s book, he describes this process in detail in Sri Lanka where there had been massive trauma based both in war and a Tsunami that had killed many people. Sri Lankans had every reason to be traumatized and to show evidence of PTSD. Western experts arrived on the scene and made broad assumptions about what the Sri Lankan population needed and how they could be helped. Ignoring local networks of collective care and healing, the trauma experts noted that there was no western mental health system to assist on their work. They set out to correct this perceived deficit by a large-scale psycho-educational campaign to assist the Sri Lankans in recognizing the symptoms of PTSD. The experts were troubled by the fact that the campaign seemed to fall on deaf ears because the symptoms they expected to see were not present. People seemed to be managing their trauma using traditional collective supports and indigenous healing practices. It should be noted that this didn’t stop the experts from insisting that the Sri Lankans needed their help in establishing “real” mental health care.
I worry that too often those of us in CYC are like the trauma experts in Sri Lanka. That we can be blinded by conventional wisdom and frameworks of truth to such a degree that we replace our capacity to hear or see what is really happening to those we serve (and ourselves). Relational work cannot be evidence-based, because such evidence is always based in statistical normative data. True relational work is idiosyncratic and deeply ecological. Trauma does not have universal predictors or treatments. Like all real living events trauma is complex and dynamic and the modes of healing associated with it are similarly unique to people, geographies, and histories. Until and unless we come to understand this as a field, we will continue to be accomplices in destroying the unique and rich cultural ecosystem that offers us so much to learn about what it really means to relationally heal.
