As we approach the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, I find myself sitting with and welcoming the darkness, in myself and in the world. I just finished reading the galley of My Grandmother’s Hands author Resmaa Menakem’s new book The Quaking of America, about trauma healing somatic practices meant to prepare our bodies for the high likelihood of Civil War in America. Then, this morning, I read a Washington Post article “We Are Closer To Civil War Than Any Of Us Would Like To Believe.”
That led me to ponder bullies from a trauma-informed lens. There are the bullies who abuse their power and victimize others, who themselves were usually bullied and overpowered at some point in the past. Then there are those who fight back against bullies, those who run away from bullies, and those who use their power to protect others from bullies. Consider also those who defend and ally with bullies or those who eroticize or look up to bullies, feeling safer becoming a minion of or lover of the bullies. And then there are those who wind up victims, who get flattened by bullies or who are manipulated or violently forced by bullies into surrender- leading to oppression, sexual assault, physical injury, all number of criminal abuses, or even death.
All of this bullying and victimizing is a trauma response, and it’s all about power and how it can corrupt us. I’ve been thinking a lot about bullying lately as it relates to power- at the level of nested fractals. From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, sometimes we bully our “parts” inside, as when one part makes a New Years Resolution and then after another part breaks it, an inner critic part comes in and bullies the part that broke the resolution. When we work with our parts using IFS, when we’re in Self, we can be tender and compassionate with all of our parts instead of bullying them.
Take that out one layer, and we can look at our external family systems. We bully our children if we’re blended with parts that abuse power, or maybe we let our children bully us if we’re blended with conflict-avoidant, boundary-wounded parts. Likewise, when we’re in Self, we can be tender and compassionate with our children without letting them bulldoze right over us. In our friendships, romantic relationships, and business networks, we may also wind up being the bully or the bullied, depending on our coping strategies and trauma symptoms. When we’re in Self, we avoid overpowering or being overpowered, sharing power more strategically.
Take all that nested bullying and abuse of power to the cultural level and you wind up with racism, slavery, genocide, colonization and the US as the world’s bully, which is now getting bullied by the bully of all bullies, Donald Trump. It made me pause and wonder, “Is the bullying and tendency to abuse power that results from childhood trauma at the root of all that ails us, personally, relationally, culturally, and globally? Is it possible that trauma is the theory of everything, at least everything that causes us pain?
As part of my collaboration with the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP), a political organization seeking to influence White House, Congressional, and state government public policy with a trauma-informed approach, I had already been asked to take a stab at trying to explain how trauma may lie at the root of most of what ails us personally, relationally, collectively, and environmentally. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about bullies that I saw these nested layers of how power gets abused, starting inside of ourselves, parts bullying other parts, telescoping all the way out to the cultural and global scale. Is power and how we abuse it at the root of all that ails us?
INDIVIDUAL TRAUMA
Let’s start our exploration of “trauma as the theory of everything” at the level of the individual. We’re all familiar with the obvious forms of shock trauma that can change us from high-functioning, loving, healthy individuals to shellshocked war veterans, dissociated survivors of natural disaster, numbed out cult survivors, or traumatized rape or kidnapping victims. Witnessing the impact of such trauma tends to evoke easy compassion. We feel empathy for those who are victimized by the power of war, the power of Mother Nature’s wrath, the power cult leaders exert over their vulnerable followers, and the power rapists and kidnappers abuse with their victims. Our empathy helps us keep our hearts open to survivors of shock traumas like these.
But what about survivors of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s)– those childhood traumas that result from physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, domestic violence in the home, substance abuse in the home, mental illness in the home, parental separation or divorce, or an incarcerated family member? Yet aren’t many of these ACE traumas also related to power and how we wield it? Without appropriate screening and intervention, these ACE trauma survivors may go undiagnosed, unnoticed, and untreated. We may only suspect someone has a high “ACE score” when we observe behaviors that are obvious trauma symptoms, such as substance abuse, criminally boundary violating behavior, mental illness, or certain kinds of physical disease. If a child was victimized by others who abused power, it’s natural that they might grow up either bullying others or getting bullied.
ILLNESS AS A TRAUMA SYMPTOM
As I explain in great detail in my upcoming book Sacred Medicine (which you can preorder here), one of the common manifestations of a high ACE score is adult-onset physical illness. If you doubt that trauma and disease are strongly linked, consider what California Surgeon General and pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, MD said in her groundbreaking TEDMED talk: “In the mid-’90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I’m talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It’s childhood trauma.”
Dr. Burke Harris is referring to the landmark 1990 study of 17,421 patients, conducted by Dr. Vince Felitti at Kaiser Permanente and Dr. Bob Anda at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who collaborated on the ACE study, which has resulted in over seventy peer-reviewed scientific articles. ACEs have been well-studied by scientists, and there is rigorous scientific data linking exposure to ACEs to autoimmune disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), frequent headaches, ischemic heart disease, liver disease, and health-related quality of life. Even the most mainstream cancer centers are examining the link between trauma and disease. Researchers from Harvard and Moffitt Cancer Center studied 55,000 people and found that those who had six or seven symptoms of PTSD at some point in their lives have double the lifetime risk of ovarian cancer.
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA
As awareness of ACE’s increases at the level of public health, and as we grow more sophisticated in spotting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in survivors of shock trauma, another type of trauma goes largely unrecognized, undiagnosed, and untreated- developmental trauma, or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD.) What about the subtle traumas of everyday life that interfere with a child’s healthy nervous system development and set them up for a lifetime of struggle, the invisible traumas that may be hard to spot, diagnose, or understand? What about those whose ACE score is zero but who still struggle in ways that are hard for the individual or others to understand? It may be harder for us to feel compassion for these individuals because they may look like privileged people who lived charmed lives on the outside. As such, our compassion may not extend to them the same way it would...