As birthworkers we talk a lot about Trauma Informed Care. It’s a buzz word that is becoming more and more mainstream. Basically, it reminds us never to forget our basic, soft skills – to always remember that people may be bringing heavy baggage into a conversation. Whether it is trauma experienced in this lifetime or generational trauma encoded into their cells from conception, navigating discussions with someone who is being triggered can be challenging and upsetting, so we learn to go gently, with love and enthusiastic consent.
Trauma can dictate how a person interprets our words. It can manifest in many ways, from heightened emotion, aggression or frozen disassociation. It can create barriers – to human connection, informed decision making and nurturing relationships.
So we become adept at our core skills of communication; listening hard for the meaning between the lines, seeking points of connection where compassion can flow, using gentle words that validate our clients’ emotions and help foster a feeling of trust and safety.
It gives me the warm fuzzies every day when I witness this kind of communication happening. When I see doulas resisting the urge to make assumptions, recognising shared humanity and finding places of mutual understanding so that challenges can be addressed, together, as a team. I love it when birthworkers from very different backgrounds can find common ground, collaborate and create community.
But what about when we are not wearing our doula hats? What about when the subject we are discussing stirs up deep emotion for us? It can be oh so much more challenging when both parties come to the table dragging heavy sacks filled with trauma. The skills we carry so lightly with clients can float away when we, ourselves are triggered by the person we are communicating with. In the white heat of our own feelings, we can forget that the person in front of us is traumatised too.
And when the interactions are happening on social media, it can be even more difficult. We may not know this person in real life. It can be easy to forget they have a backstory. And when every fibre of our bodies is buzzing with adrenaline, it can be easy to forget to be curious, to be compassionate, to even care how they might be feeling. It can be easy, if we’re feeling angry or upset, to even wish on them the same feelings and begin to use words as weapons, instead of tools for connection.
Right now there are wars going on all over the world. People use guns and rockets and bombs, kidnapping and cruelty to try to solve disagreements. People die. Innocent people. The injustice and the suffering is too much to bear. Being witness to carnage is bad enough, but if family and friends are directly affected, the trauma is intense. No one wants war – unless you’re an arms dealer, of course. We all yearn for peace and feel powerless to help.
And so those feelings of trauma, frustration, anger and sadness can dictate how we act on social media. It can stop us remembering to use the skills we use with our clients every day. Judgement and fury can make our fingers fly to the keyboard.
I get it. I know how it feels. But I’d like to pose this one question: if you want war to stop, how does a war of words help achieve that?
It is wars of words that result in guns and death. Awash with trauma, many people are unable to engage in a dispassionate debate. Debate descends into an arms race of ever increasing insults and upset. Stomachs churn and hearts race, palms sweat and friendships and trust are broken.
What do you hope to achieve by entering the arena? Because if you hope to change hearts and minds, educate people, share the nuance and complexity of a situation, that is hardly ever possible when trauma is fraying tempers on social media. Rather it entrenches people in their ‘side’, blowing up the bridges that may have resulted in mutual understanding. I’m not saying don’t share facts and explore nuance – the grey areas are where we will find peace and connection. But trust has to be built first, vulnerability shown, humanity expressed.
Of course, I’m not saying it’s an easy life taking the pacifist route. It’s bloody uncomfortable sitting up here on this fence, tirelessly refusing to paint any one side as the baddies, berating war, knowing that war makes victims of us all. It’s painful being the one perpetually being criticised for not taking a side, being criticised for expressing compassion for one side without immediately balancing it with compassion for the other, being criticised for allowing hurtful words in an online space I own and curate and conversely being criticised for asking for compassion and neutrality in that same space.
It takes strength and dedication to refuse to fall into old habits of anger, to bite that tongue or still those fingers when fury or nausea overcomes us. And it takes guts to decide not to fire words like bullets or drop insults like bombs, hoping to hurt those they land on.
It takes energy to enter the arena with love and compassion for everyone. It takes a lot out of us to find empathy for others when the alarm bells in our amygdala are so noisy we can’t truly hear what others are saying, nor able to take a breath and wonder what feelings are behind those words. And it takes wisdom to realise that we are not in the right place to enter the arena. It takes wisdom to realise that we are carrying too much trauma to be of any constructive help to the situation. Sometimes, it takes wisdom to realise that right now, while I process my trauma and healing, silence is the best thing I can do to bring peace into the world. It’s not being complicit, it’s keeping our own counsel and ensuring we are not broken by the suffering around us. After all, what good can I be in the world if I collapse under the weight of trauma and suffering? Silence is considering what careful, compassionate words I will use when I do choose to speak.
It’s no one else’s business what public utterances you make. Your feelings, your trauma, and your life’s challenges are invisible to others on social media and theirs are invisible to you. So judgement and criticism merely open up old wounds and create new ones, getting us further and further from peace. Performative posting is not necessary – you do not need to prove your compassion on social media. Just as doulas strive to teach that people’s bodies belong to them, so do their thoughts, feelings and opinions.
It is a privilege to be able to raise our voices in support of those who can’t. And it is a privilege to be able to choose to stay silent. It is what we do with our privilege and our awareness of it that counts.
In the end, it’s all about courage and vulnerability. Being true to ourselves makes us vulnerable and that’s frightening. I am frightened writing this, worried about offending people I love. But I hope that people will meet me in the spirit I try to engage in all communications – always trying to remember what fear and hurt may be behind people’s words and conscious of the way my body reacts to those words. Sometimes, I have the energy to think carefully about how I reply. Sometimes though I need to maintain a strong boundary of silence for my own mental health and to tip the scales of a conversation towards calm and connection.
There is a time to speak and a time for silence, the old saying goes. It goes on to say there is a time for war and a time for peace. But I am unable to accept that it is the natural order of things for our species to kill each other and harm each other with our words. We can choose. In the small ways and in the big, we can choose peace. We can create spaces online that are an oasis of peace. If we choose to enter the debate we can do so with a spirit of trauma informed living when the time is right. And we can step back and care for ourselves when we need to.
As Brene Brown says:
“We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time. Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”
Thank you for these wise words! It does matter what tools we use to construct the new world we need. If we continue using words of hate, we’ll get the same old structures that oppress and hurt. Only by doing something different can we build a compassionate way of living.