We are Not Good at Listening: A Thread on Trauma and Outraged Commentary.

CW: This is about the triggers, the causes, and the continuation of trauma in personal life and community. Please bear with me as I try not to use academic language for something extremely complicated.

Personal note: I'm writing this with 2 perspectives. First is as a former mental health professional. My work ranged from disaster relief to social exclusion.

I'm also writing this as someone who has been traumatized, and has had his own conditions to complicate my management.

Why I am writing this: honestly, because I think many people in my spaces I inhabit are well-intentioned, but not equipped to handle trauma. Unfortunately, trauma is a useful catch-all, but it doesn't capture the diversity of responses and attached emotions linked to it.

What I would like to discuss is how to listen to trauma. It's often hard to hear, because when trauma is expressed in maladaptive ways, we focus on the pain we're experiencing (totally normal), rather than the pain expressed.

It's hard to listen when you're getting attacked.

It's particularly hard when the expression of trauma is enough to traumatize in turn. Secondary trauma stress disorder, vicarious trauma, and trauma contagion are real, so much so that we need to address how to express hurt without causing it.

We can traumatize others when we are traumatized. It's a cycle that perpetuates, and unfortunately, is commonly seen in abusive circumstances.

That said, we also need guidance on how to listen to hurt, because acts of invalidation/harsh containment are also traumatizing.

(Does it sound like a shit show? Yes. It is.)

Thus, when we are forced into a situation where pain's a present force, it often means acting out of instinct. This is where it gets quite dicey, and where we find instances of dramatic escalation because we don't know what to do.

So TLDR so far:

- We can traumatize others when we express our trauma.
- We can traumatize others based on how we receive their trauma.
- We can get traumatized receiving other people's trauma.
- We can do all of the above.

Trauma management tries to break these loops, because in many instances we can find ourselves escalating in the response to the negative feedback we give each other, kept in a cycle of triggers begetting triggers.

Which bring us to listening.

Trauma is an awful beast because it can blank you out even as you say and do things that require cognition. Some of the harshest things I have ever said is in response to my triggers. When I remember how awful I am, I wonder: Why did I say those things?

Meanwhile, when I am on the receiving end of these verbal javelins, I need to stop myself from responding in kind, or worse, with the kind of response that itself is a trigger.

Tone policing, for example, is a trigger, because being forced to silence is many people's trauma.

The trauma dynamic often means being focused on the self, out of a fear, anxiety, anger, survival instincts. Trauma can wire people to instantly resist what caused the trauma in the first place.

We need to listen in that moment. A triggered person is a threatened one.

Conversely, if one is traumatized, we need to try to listen where the threat is coming from, and assess well.

I think this is what makes online discussions so difficult, because triggers can come from everywhere, a mass of threatening behavior in the form of multiple responses.

It also means that this process of trauma is replicated extremely quickly, because when you shout into Twitter, you potentially are a trigger to many people at once who respond to you. It's hundreds of escalations at once.

How can you listen in this din?

This brings us to outrage. I'm no expert with the social psychology of it; I think we're dealing with communities caught in a collective trauma response.

This begs the question again: how can anyone listen? Are we accurately hearing the dangers that the traumatized detect?

When this happens---and it will happen again, I am sure of it---I hope that we can remind each other to listen and look for what is making this discussion feel dangerous.

A space can't be safe if you can't identify where the dangers are.

The other thing we need to remember is that we need to view the dangers for what they are, and not to project these dangers into something they're not. Anything else is escalation.

Does it sound hard? Yes. It is. Trauma management demands staggering efforts in self-awareness.

This is why we need to listen in order to be aware of locating where we are in our responses, feelings, actions. We need to remind ourselves, and each other, that we are capable of having this discussion later, when we are calm.

When we're ready.

Mind you, I am not saying we should delay painful discussions indefinitely. What I'm saying that responding in trauma is probably not the safest time to delve into the topic.

And if we are acting awry because we are triggered, we need to be responsible for that too.

I recognize that this is a huge demand on a community, and that's why it hurts, sometimes to be part of one. And there are days, yes, I just want to check out and be isolated.

I don't think we can have a community if we don't do the work, however.

TLDR what can we do?

- Try to listen actively for what is making this feel dangerous.
- Identify these dangers, be aware of them.
- Avoid them, help others feel safe despite these dangers.
- Clear these dangers as needed.

I've said before there is no "one size fits all" solution to trauma, and I also don't like generalized statements about communities in trauma. What's important here is that we try to respond compassionately as we get into the details.

Finally: I wish we could just say, "go to therapy" as a solution, but this isn't one that is readily available to most. And even if therapy is ongoing/has happened, it doesn't mean that we're always prepared for the trigger.

What matters is consistency afterwards.

If we hurt someone, either by being a trigger, or by lashing out: are we learning from this? Can we doing better? Have we tried to make amends?

If we've been hurt: have we checked our injuries? What support do we need for this?

Again, it's a lot to ask for. But I've been in enough worse situations (Typhoon Haiyan, which made me quit G&T afterwards) that felt apocryphal. And these blowups do not compare to this, so there's still time for things to improve.