How can we stop hurting each other?

I am a woman, I’m white, I’m Jewish, I’m Israeli, I’m a USer, I’m a mom, I’m upper class, I am an artist, I’m a small-fat-sized person.

Every time there’s a current event that raises the topic of privilege, I get to look at my collection of identities and how these are informed by trauma.

We often think of trauma as an individual issue but groups of people suffer from trauma as well and the trauma that we suffer from as individuals is affected by the groups that we belong to.

Sometimes trauma can happen by accident but more often than not it happens in the context of and even as a result of our identities.

Groups of people suffer from trauma mostly as a result of oppression. Those who are oppressed are traumatized by the effects of the oppression. Those who carry out the oppression are suffering because in order to be able to carry out oppressive behavior people need to be cut off from their humaneness.

Oppression affects people directly or indirectly. It affects people’s thinking and behavior and that ends up being passed down from one generation to another.

Can you see how some of my identities put me in the category of being oppressed and some as an oppressor? I try not to act in oppressive ways but I’m probably not always successful. My hope is that I can break the cycle by addressing my socially induced trauma.

When I work on my own trauma in therapy or when I facilitate somebody's process I always take into account our identities. I either have it in the back of my mind to help me understand the uniqueness of the client’s experience, or I address the way that the oppression causes the trauma directly.

In Somatic Therapy, we talk a lot about bodies and there’s sometimes a tendency to separate the body from everything else that’s going on. My view is that our bodies can not be separated from the environment that they exist in.

For our society to heal as a whole and for groups of people in our society to stop acting out in ways that harm other groups or themselves, individuals need to heal from the kind of trauma that was passed down to them as part of their social identity.

As always I love hearing what you have to say so feel free to respond to this email with your comments and questions.

On a similar but different note, I wanted to share with you something about how fully feeling your emotions can work in your favor.