Tag: Feral

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Collective Trauma

kimberleen

Oh wow. When I wrote this as a title I had no idea that I would be writing it straight off the bat after having completed a mini project about land trauma. It’s like I want to write you a list of all the individuated causes of trauma I have come across over the last few weeks and even years, so that you might get a sense of what collective trauma actually means. It’s a long list, some of which I have explored in a number of previous blog posts and I am sure at some point might translate into an E-Book or even a book, book. Some of the primary sources of personal trauma are land, religious, educational, economic, institutional, gender, race, sexuality. Yup it’s a shit show. As you will know if you are reading this as part of Feral The Systemic Healing Circle. I have defined myself as a Systemic Trauma Specialist. What that means is that I look at all the ways in which ‘The System’ creates trauma. How those traumas intersect and become amplified.

Each one of the above material trauma’s might form a more specific psychological manifestation of collective trauma. One facet of religeous trauma might be religious guilt or specifically Christian guilt, as a result of original sin. That as a result of being born of original sin you are inherently sinful (Yup it’s loaded). Even though we ourselves may not speficially experience the guilt of original sin, their are millions of people out their that do. Original sin and it’s emotional psychological implications is an experience known to many as well as being a belief that has been held intergenerationally and thus ancestrally for over a millenaia. When we begin to apprcaite the weight of such a concept and how long it has been held in the human field we begin to approciate the unseen power it might have over the collective field. This is collective trauma. Of course original sin is only one of thousands of internalised belief systems that might inform collective trauma. I wonder how many you can easily indentify within yourself?

Let me break it down for you a little more. You see we all carry trauma, intergenerational and even epigentic (trauma that is carried in our genes). For example many of us experience land trauma. We are dispossessd, do not live in the indigenous lands of our ancestors. We have no connection back to the roots that connect us to any of our ancestral lineages, where not raised speaking the mother tongue of or people of our clan. As a result many of us feel displaced or lost in the world, continually looking for a way back to ourselves. The reason of the disconnection can be multiplus from family fueds to, economic deprivation, famine, war and much much more.

Many of these events that caused the displacement and disconnection become point of cultural trauma for example slavery, the Irish Potaoe Famine, The Holocaust. These are historical events who’s impacts move through time and create historical trauma. As each of these event impact an individual, a family, a community, a national identity they become part of cultural identity, collective consciousness and thus part of our collective trauma. As it is up to each individual, family, community, nation to resolve this trauma, trauma becomes fluid moving through realtionship, generations, spaces waiting to be healed.

Other things too can contribute to collective trauma such as sexism and racism. Collective trauma can be so prevelant yet appear to be invisible. That it is something so obvious that we might not even fully recognise it’s impact like World War Two or in South Africa, Apartheid. Collective trauma can also extend to intersecting structures of ‘The System’ like Colonialism, Religion and Education. When we really take our time to get to know people community and places there are common threads of collective trauma that run through all our lives. This does not mean to to say that Collective Trauma affects all of us the same. Some people have recurring nightmares, others dysfunctional family sytstems, while many of us battle with collective trauma as part of a ‘mental health’ innerscape. Inequality also plays it’s part in sustaining collective trauma. It is not as straight forward as either cultural or strucutural trauma often collective trauma can manifest in the environments that we live in.

So to put it succintly and as far as I am concerned Collective Trauma is how we psychically hold Systemic Trauma. Yes I just said the word psychically.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude to accompany Feral Systemic Healing Circle.

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Punk Attitude

kimberleen

Years ago someone once asked me if I was “a hippy or a punk?”. The way that someone might ask you if you prefer cheese or chocolate? I pondered it over sensing that there was something much deeper underlying the question than I fully understood at the time. You see I had fantasies of being a hippy but my lived reality was very far from sunflowers and flares. What was even more terrifying was that as History of Modern Art graduate was that I wasn’t to sure exactly what was meant by the question and realised I might have missed something big in my understanding of the two movements.

You see I’d never given the punk movement much attention. It wasn’t pretty it didn’t make me feel good and although I love the Sex Pistols and everything they stood for I wasn’t ready to own that level of explosive dissent. All that rage was ugly. Why can’t it all be the higher ideals of love, peace and non-violence? I’m a libra. I answered the question. “I’m a hippy.” I was met with “Kimberley you are so a punk.” and just like that the reality of my own self-perception was thrown out the window and turned upside down by a rather impressive activist who had been collaborating with Platform for a while. Maybe this could be pinpointed as where my shadow work began. Then it was explained to me that in essence I was willing to take imperfect action and I wasn’t into spiritual bypassing (before that was a thing). To be clear at that point the cultural movement that I belonged to didn’t have a name yet. We were the generation that wished that we “were punk rockers with flowers in our hair, we were born too late to a world that doesn’t care.” We were proto hipsters searching for authenticity, meaning and belonging in a very fake world (‘they’ even monetised that). Apathy was the word of the decade after the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War where 100,000 people marched for a cause and a call that has never been answered. Tony Blair and George W. Bush are war criminals in case you didn’t get the memo. There’s no justice for the powerful (take note). President Trump at least was only intent on radicalising his own country. Trump and Boris are the just desserts of any person not engaged in the political capital of there own community. So there it is.

I was and am somebody willing to take imperfect action, get pissed off and get involved. It was always clear to me that there was no other path other than social responsibility. You see ever since I can remember we’ve (that’s society) have been fucking up people, families, communities and the environment at a staggering rate. It was and is shocking. Yet nobody cared. That was the way of it. That was progress. Our parents were more concerned about fitting in with a society that was destroying itself than taking action for the natural world we clearly belonged in. The parables were endless and yet still progress pushed on. For those of us who chose to sit on the sidelines, disengaged from the destruction it was agonising, exhausting often excruciating to witness. The self-destruction that emerged through political engagement was tangible. To be an activist was to be poor, disenfranchised, marked out and criminalised. The ongoing critique of our approaches was endless. With more people questioning why you would choose your own personal annihilation over doing the right thing…?

There were so many causes to fight for, so much to say. There wasn’t enough time. We just had to do the best we could with the resources we had and the odds stacked endlessly against us. There’s a reason why Greta Thunberg became the activist of this generation. A child all alone. All we could do is what we could, and what we can without the slick resources of the greenwashing and societal gaslighting that we still didn’t have a word for yet. Anxiety paralysis came to rule as we balanced self-care with what is now termed eco-anxiety. In the end, for me it became a choice between the subtle art of inaction and the ability to authentically produce. If I waited until it was perfect, if I waited until it was ready to be accepted by the establishment, it would never be ready and neither would I. I had to be willing to take my rage to the world if a little sanitised. I needed somewhere to take my unresolvable feelings blog writing became that place. It became my safe place to figure out me and the world simultaneously. I’m on year thirteen of this journey. Still very few are reading cause I’m not presenting it in a way that’s easy to digest that doesn’t fit into a highly curated mould for easy consumption. It’s deliberate. It’s here to highlight your prejudices. It’s here to make you think about what’s acceptable behaviour. It’s here to get you to think differently.

I’ve had too many conversations about. If you just tweaked this. Or if you just did that. Meanwhile, I am actually trained in curation. You see it goes beyond slick marketing and getting the message out, these blog posts are an artistic creation. I’m questioning the system not answering to it. I’m anti-aesthetic for a reason. These are messy for a reason. What I have to say is of value no matter how it is presented, like the homeless person, the black women, the guy with the speech impediment, the dyslexic writer. Fuck you and your judgement. Fuck the system. Do you know why? All previous perceptions are leading to our extinction. Time to get down with your shadow self people. Remember the only people who are upholding the system are the ones who benefit from it.

So if you want to know why these blog posts are messy, unedited it’s because I made a choice to get started with a punk attitude and hippy ideals.

Today I was offered a breakthrough moment of how to create context by Thrive With Me who wanted to collaborate rather than control… and inspired this whole blog post by asking me to provide a little context. I hope you enjoyed this unexpected sidenote.

If you want to find out more about what I do and get to grips with systemic trauma you can learn more by signing up for Feral Systemic Healing Circle.

* This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Radical Acceptance Circle

kimberleen

Well I need some Radical Acceptance right now it’s abotu 1 am in the morning and I’m tryign to ine up a years worth of email sending in order to buy time to do a MRes in Human Geography. Like seriously I feel like I am gaslighting myself as to whether this process and line of action is even possible at this poitn of the game. Bar 1 essay thus far everything I’ve submitted has been late. yet I am still doing the best I can and forging on, failing hard. Yet here I am writing my future. At least we can see where my priorities lie. It certianly isn’t in impressing a whole bunch of university professors, though it would be rather lovely to pass.

Anyways I have got somewhat of a dirty little secret to share. I’ve been running a circle and I haven’t told you about it. Mainly because it was started in service of a select group of doulas. Now it would appear that this time has come to open it up to everybody. So if you would like to join a circle of people every Monday and Friday that are deeply into some radical acceptance you are more than welcome to join us to cry, wail, keen, scream and well whatever you would like really. I’d love to tell you all about, However I working on a ‘manuscript’ and I would hate to spoil the surprise. When I’m ready to add a pre-order button on the finished product I’ll be sure to let you know. 2020 was tough and if we are truly honest it looks like 2021 is going to get a bit tougher. Click through to sign-up for the Radical Acceptance Circle it runs on a donation basis though there is absolutly no obligation to donate. You are free to join us however whenever. It’s all about the Wellbeing Economy you know.

I’m in the process of setting up and integrated trauma wise community, which you can access through my Healing Humans Facebook Group Please be aware that once in this group you might be exposed to some rather mindbending information, after all exapanding conscioussness is and extensive part of the job of a healer. So yeah see you on the flip side or say hello to Janice my higher-self, she’s great, much wiser than I am.

If you have enjoyed reading this article you can donate here or check out my shop for services.

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Trauma Bomb

kimberleen

Well I’m sure somewhere in my badly executed media strategy I had a concept of all the issues that might revolve around the idea of Feral. My new Systemic Healing Circle for anybody that actually gives a shit about current world affairs. Where I was going to outline very intelligently all the ways in which the Feral concept came into being. About wildness, re-wilding, where in the meantime some of us (aka me) never managed to get fully sytemised in the first place. Like a feral cat that didn’t get exactly what they wanted out of system, that was supposedly designed to support them I was all and am still all too ready to tear the dysfunctional system apart if it didn’t serve me perfectly.

First of all this kind of approach and attitude to the system is highly indicative of personal trauma and second of all why the fuck is everyone else so compliant? There are more questions too that include: Is it just me? Why can’t you just get along? Accompanied by deeper musings… if the system doesn’t serve everybody does it serve anybody? You see that is the challenge with systems (speaking as somebody that just spent a week of her life scheduling emails for the year) they don’t work for everybody. As human components of the system when we meet people that don’t fit into our agenda, the trajectory of an organisation or the guiding principles of society we tend to ignore, overlook, dimiss, silence, reject, remove, exile and even kill the people that don’t agree. Fucking scary right? Why do we do that? Because its uncomfortable, inconvenient, disruptive, time consuming, difficult and ultimately embarassing to admit that we don’t have all the answers, nor are we capable of delivering all the solutions. That the rules, the law and ‘our’ procedures don’t work for everybody. That actually the system denies our humanity by denying many of the humans that belong to it. And you know what? We do this mainly all in the name of progress.

As I am sure that I have written this multiple times the micro informs the macro. The challenges that we have globally are relational. That the system rejects the interpersonal as significant and engrains, neglect, abuse and trauma into systemic relations. This is why I often tend to talk about the anti-human system. There is so much programming that fuels these kind of behaviours it’s hard to accept that for the most part we are contributing to the toxic systems that keep people at best stuck and at worst traumatised. The real trick is figuring out where we are perpetuting harm in a toxic system. And more than this where we are silently complicit. This week (tonight in fact) I start the Feral Systemic Healing Circle, which morphed and developed from a few approches that included the idea of a group called Complicit Anonoymous (that never got off the ground). The premis of Complicit Anonymous was that most of us with any ____________ (insert applicable word here) know that we cause harm and are contributing to societal collapse, the 6th mass extinction and climate change. Most of us are all operating in systems that largely refuse to ancknowldege the ways in which they cause harm. From the single mother that won’t receive a wellfare check to the petrochemical dependency of most companies and yet we choose to carry on buisness as usual. Where there are so many things to stand up for so many injustices to fight against it’s fucking exhasuting. Yet we carry these burdens as we too remain trapped in the cycle of perpetuating economic growth and maintain economic power by controlling resources, such as land access. Yet at the same time impacting basic resources such as air. The consumptive behaviour of the money classes and developed countries are having dire consequencies of the air quality of the systemically abused and ‘developing’ economies. Yet we carry on. Of course I am as guit as the next person. The challege is that all these behaviour are interconnected and intersectional as we try to build a way out of the Systemic Trauma Bomb that we have created.

Why is this artilce called Trauma Bomb I often write about how the personal informs the planetary. Last week I witnessed and experieinced what I can only be describe as a trauma bomb. It’s where two or more emotional triggers and thus unresolved trauma meets and blows up. It was an interpersonal relational masterpiece of destruction that threw most of if not all of my work schedule totally of schedule. It would have been great to ignore it. It would have been great to deny that my unrecognised trauma, the previously unseen shadow had anything to do with it, ignore the other persons issue and of course bythly carry on. That wasn’t possible. No matter how bad the circumstances. How dire the consequences of an emotional outburst, explosion or trauma bomb is we have to take the time to work with the trauma, acknowledge the pain and find new strategies. Nobody, not even a trauma doula is going to get it right all of the time, especially when we are working with our shadows, the things that we can’t see. You see shadow work gets complicated when we start to understand collective shadow work or even just the shadow of the companies organisations we work for or even run. You see what are the trauma bombs of thes organisations, companies and structures when their shadows meet. I think we are seeing these play out perfectly in the USA right now. Where corporate media fails to take repsonsibily for promoting and endorising very traumatised man and encouraging all his traumatised followers while denying the legitmacy of Black Lives Matter. Racism is systemic trauma. Yet the USA seems to be living a polarity of full scale systemic trauma denial that is engrained into most of it’s insitutions. Why won’t Mike Pence get rid of Trump?

That’s why my spelling is wobbly, I’m not trying to hide that I am dyslexic. I’m actively exposing my shadow. Why do I say I’m traumatised frequently? So it liberates you to say it too. Trauma is the real pandemic. In a society built on privilige, competion and capitalism Letting everyone know where all the gremlins are puts me at a major disadvantage. I’m absolutely fucking certain that numerous people have judged me for the quality of my output. Indeed totally bypassed it. I thank you. Language and presentation even though I have forgetten to mention it numerable times in my writing is a key componant of Systemic Trauma. Saying you could do better? If you just paid a bit more attention to your work? or the killer “Can you speak english please?” The answer to that question is no I can’t. Are you listening properly? Are you paying attention? Can you see where your biases, your prejudice and your biggotory yet? If I waited until I met your standards I would never have gotten started and indeed the terror of being judged for my seeming laziness or lack of attention has prevented me from flourishing far sooner in life. So yes here we are all complit in a toxic system, looking for a way out we can’t buy. If you are looking for solutions it’s time to sign-up to Feral Systemic Healing Circle.

This articel is the first in a year long series acompanying Feral Systemic Healing Circle

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Feral

kimberleen

I’m fairly confident that I have not written about this before. I’ve got no idea why, given that its’ been burning though my brain as an idea ever since forever ago. Like alot of the ideas I have. Anyways I’m really excited about this one. Let me say this very clearly, I am feral. I don’t belong in the system and my natural environment has been destroyed and well it’s left me somewaht untameable. That might be how you youd describe me if I was an animal, and then of course I am. Human’s are animals, we certainly seem to follow our worst impulses a lot of the time (that will be the trauma). And yes most of live very far outside the confines of our natural envirnoment, most of us don’t even have access to a natural water source these days, especially if we live in cities. We are forced to drink chlorine for our own good.

You see I got a bit pissed of with all these re-wilding wild women posts, projects and groups that seemed to need a matching head dress to go with you mass produced slave labour arm bands in order to feel free. What true wild human have you met that has a warddrobe of accesories that are weather essentials? Anyways I should probably stay quiet here. My bad attitude hardwire is being to shine through after a rather intesne week. That’s my problem that is why I might describe my self as feral. I don’t fit into the system, in fact it terrifies me that so many people do. I’m literally lost as to how people keep together such a distinct and fuck-up socital lie. Except of course for paychecks. That’s how. Would anybody like to talk abour corruption? We are courrupt. Remember you can’t eat money? Universal enslavement has been a thing for a while now. As I’m sure any Marx theorist will tell you. So yeah I called bullshit on the system a long time ago. I didnt’ like it going in and I’ve broken the heels of all the pretty shoes I have doing the best I can to stay out. In fact I’ve nearly destroyed myself to be non-complict in the system’s anti-human ways. So yes fuck the system. Fuck the system hard.

It’s not very productive though is it? So I’ll internalise capitalism and keep on writing. So if you are disruptor an interested in Personal Activism and Systemic Healing you can sign up to join the Feral Systemic Healing Circle which convenes on or around every new moon of 2021.

If you have enjoyed reading this article you can donate here or check out my shop for services.