I’ve been working on niching for years, padding round the issues with a few ah-ha moments with very little actually landing other than a few keywords and concepts, from Self-Nurturance to Personal Activism. Healing Humans to Collective Futures. Earthlings and Bloodline Trauma. Emotional Environments to Land Healing and even Human Geography and the Wellbeing Economy.
What I was trying to say seemed too big and cumbersome to effectlively niche in. I’ve trotted around ideas of overwhelm and crisis. I’ve thought about secure attachment and support systems. Community building, emotional mapping, global patterns and issues. I’ve known for a very long time that they are all connected that it’s not any one thing but all of them without having the words to explain. Then all of a sudden trauma kinda became mainstream and the system became increasingly under attack. I have no idea how many times I have had conversations about “The System” in art studios, on beaches, basement flats and even in public talks. That it’s not just one thing it’s everything all without fully sinking into the idea of both systemic abuse and systemic trauma. They say if you don’t have a word for something you aren’t able to fully discuss it.
It finally hit me. All of a sudden it’s become clear to me what it is Systemic Trauma I actually deal with as The Life Doula. Systemic Trauma!!! It took a while and we got there. I’m not sure when it hit or even why then it was here and then it stayed and now I’m getting on with living with it. And saying hey I know you. Do you want a cup of tea? Can we talk about this a bit more? Luckily I’ve spent many years talking about all of the above. That seems to have made me perfect for the job I invented for myself.
That I have been burrowing down through form a very early age. Whether it by dysfunctional family life, cultural abuse, religious abuse, the education system, sexism, the capitalist system, violence, ecocide, racism, and colonialism. I write that list in no order of priority other than the chronological order in which I myself have experienced them.
There are many places where my journey started from family disharmony to hating school, rejecting the Catholic Church, the Capitalist System and the impacts of Colonialism. It was this big messy ball of string that never fully became unravelled until one summer when I had the privilege of being the labour partner of a friend and witnessing a stranger die in front of me with a few days of one another. These two events impacted me greatly for what might seem obvious reasons. Then of course in the mind of a seeking soul for which I surely have, I felt something deeper. A vortex of thought had opened that I couldn’t get away from. Why were these two things birth and death so alien to me? How had I as a human avoided up until this point (in my late twenties) the two events that mark every life? That somehow our humaness was being systematically removed from us. It was a call to action like no other, that seemed to under pin all of our human failings. How do we restore our humaness? Every since I have felt like I have been moving through time at a very deliberate pace. That has been holding in each hand the chains of the past and the liberation of the future. That the actions that I take now have the ability to echo through time. In my own journey and that of those around me. That everything that I am able to interact with can be gently and subtly transformed if we approach them in the right way. Including me.
It’s all connected and as I have laid in bed over many years and even decades quandaring our unfolding human and planetary crisis, feeling all the feels. I have known with complete certainty for quite some time it is the human that lies at the centre of both the societal challenge and the solution. What I also know is that there are a million and one ways to “fix it” whether it be ourselves, our communities or “the planet”. That is we approach the human as the incredibly creative and unique beings that we are each one of us has a personal solution to immense challenges that face us both privately, personally, as a species and as earthlings. The planet is not endangered. We are, along with all the other Earthlings that we have imposed our human pain on. We are a danger to ourselves and it is something that needs to be urgently corrected.
So yes Systemic Trauma.
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