Trauma as a badge: Emerging cultural practices in our healing spaces (part 2)
As co-creators, how do we help support their evolution?
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In my previous post I began exploring the cultural practice of leading with wounds that I have seen emerge within the circles I run in. Healing and social justice spaces that seek to be on the forefront of ushering in a trauma-integrated world, and therefore are adopting new cultural practices to do so. Check out my part 1 here.
Circling back to my experience in that training, of people leading with their trauma, that I’ve also experienced in ordinary email exchanges and introductory calls with new colleagues—in what ways might our attempts to liberate ourselves by identifying with our wounds actually, accidentally, keep us stuck in those wounds? How might it limit opportunities to relate and bond with each other through shared identities of healing, growth, transformation? And how can we as participants in these community spaces help support the evolution of cultural practices like this?
All of these questions arise for me after many years of leading with my wounds in social interactions. Throughout my early adulthood they were at the center of my identity. “Hi, I’m Liz and this is the shit I’ve gone through. Check out my resume.” Socially, it was a way of signaling my strength to others. To communicate who I am and what I’m about. That I’m a badass spiritual warrior. That this was something that made me interesting and set me apart.
More personally, it was a way of forming a relationship with parts of me that had been hidden and kept in the shadows for the majority of my life. Repping my trauma like that, putting her at the center of my sense of self, was my way of keeping her in the light. Of forming a relationship with her by actively understanding my experience of the world through her lens. It was my way of facing her, working with her. Of stepping into being a badass spiritual warrior. Of seeing myself like that because I was actively working with her.
So, as I write this and lovingly point to the ways that this emergent cultural practice is not of service, I am holding this feeling of: I get it! This practice of leading with trauma, especially in new relationships, was something my younger self did all of the time, so I don’t knock her for it (my younger self or the cultural practice itself).
My conscious awareness of my wounds was new. It was alive for me, and newly so. A new part of my identity was developing and taking shape in real time. Doing really hard work, and seeking something in others by being shared.
This is what I see in this cultural practice, as well. That collectively we have a newly emerging awareness of trauma—historical, intergenerational, personal, institutional—that we are actively seeking to stabilize. We are seeking to stabilize this consciousness in ourselves and in the cultural bodies we inhabit, therefore we’re trying on new cultural practices to see what fits and what serves to do so.
Trauma as a badge, and therefore the cultural practice of leading with it in social settings, feels adjacent to other cultural phenomena that is new and alive, especially within my beloved social justice spaces. What is sometimes pejoratively called the “oppression olympics,” where people leverage their pain as power, as cultural clout, social positioning. Cultural bodies, community settings, networks of people where there's cultural currency to being in a position of oppression, to being in pain.
Again, the first thing that pops up into my mind is the liberatory power of owning and claiming that which has previously hurt you or held you down. Claiming the parts of you that have been suppressed and shut off and pushed away. Practicing inverse power dynamics, of centering and lifting up what has been historically marginalized, even within ourselves.
So I resonate with it. Truly. And just like with everything, there is a shadow side to it. There is the potential for unhealthy expressions of it, especially as a cultural phenomenon. Where, as a wave of energy that continues to ebb and grow, the cultural phenomenon can take forms that are unhealthy or not of service or too extreme. That it can get tangled up with ego and power dynamics and parts of our human nature that are less evolved, and that will always exist.
There are versions of this cultural phenomenon that are wrapped up in the reality of trauma bonding that takes place within certain groups. Bonding and relating to each other through shared experiences of trauma, through shared or similar identities of trauma. Especially in communities in which people are constantly responding to crisis, therefore building relationships on the shared experience of crisis. There's a whole neurochemical response that comes along with it. The adrenaline rush, a sense of pride that comes from showing up and being fucking awesome in times of need. Trauma can become a badge of honor.
But what happens when this way of relating with each other holds social power within a group? When trauma serves as a badge that determines whether you belong, whether you are in or out. Does it actually help us heal, individually and collectively? Or does it unintentionally create incentives that make it socially advantageous to not heal or to hide our health?
The training group Relational Uprising has a three-part story model that offers itself as a tool for exploring this. Through it, groups are invited to tell a story from the perspective of the challenge, the support the they had, or the values that drove them to make the decisions or learn the lessons they did. Same story, just told from a different lens; reflected on from a different entry point. They teach that each perspective can be used to cultivate different things within a team or organization: vulnerability or appreciation or purpose. I see this tool as also being a potent point of reflection for the storyteller themself. A situation that they had always seen through the lens of traumatic pain has an opportunity to be reshaped through the lens of resources and support. What resources did you have available to you that helped you get by or take a step towards healing?
Blogger Freddie Deboer has written a ton on the “glorification of mental illness,” which, again, seems to me to be a particular expression of this larger cultural phenomenon I’m pointing to. Where mental health issues are posed as cute quirks that make you stand out within the digital world. Again, I see the liberatory effort to destigmatize what has socially been in the shadows within it. But he makes the argument that this phenomenon actually “disenfranchises the sickest amongst us” because those who are most sick are least able to write articles or create TikTok videos about what they experience; they are least able to be seen. So in some ways this is leading us to have a culturally skewed sense of what true mental illness is.
So I'm curious how these cultural practices will continue to evolve, and how we as participants in these community spaces can help support their evolution. Personally, for me, this looks like being mindful to not absent-mindedly participate in cultural practices that don't actually resonate with me or feel true. To play with ways of being that uphold and elevate the liberatory intention at their core, while not succumbing to social pressure to rep something that doesn’t feel right. To be aware of dynamics—cultural, interpersonal, intrapersonal—that may stem from ego or fear or unhealth. And ultimately to invite myself to step into the co-creative nature of it all, and try to have fun with it :)