Healing Justice Toolkit:

"What do we mean by ‘healing’?

Healing: an ongoing process of mending as well as building power, resilience, and resistance to transform systems of oppression."

https://transformharm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Healing-Justice-Toolkit_PRINT_March-1.pdf

This toolkit is excellent. A couple months ago I Had Some Thoughts about the work that profs at my institution were doing on "trauma-informed" pedagogy, and I really appreciate this toolkit's emphasis on the "man-made disaster of state violence"

and understanding the trauma of (trauma as) powerlessness, esp at the hands of state violence:

and the toolkit's conception of "resilience":

also, I don't know why, but I always feel more connected to a definition of trauma that goes beyond the language of "a threat" into explicitly naming the feeling of No Escape, which is especially connected to powerlessness, in my mind.

I think all the time of this Jeanann Verlee poem--a poem, I think, about dissociation and its connection to trauma. I think about how the trauma of systems you're embedded in (and thus, cannot escape) is often worse than the trauma of the "acute incident."

What's interesting is that often, acute incidents of trauma stem from the system one is embedded in. Someone you love is killed by the state--the event is over, but you cannot escape from the system that produced that event, keeps producing that event.

Not all traumas are like this, but it does speak to the way that transformative justice tries to change conditions that allow for harm. But I do think there is a specific intensity of chronic powerlessness that cannot be escaped, systems of state violence,

and, in Verlee's poem, systems of family violence. And they are not the same, but I do think there are similar aspects of inescapability, and so often a home becomes not a place of refuge, but a site of no escape, since it is the one place you are supposed to escape TO.

& of course, the intersections of state violence and family/ domestic violence, how they support & prop each other up.

& I just.... think we can & need to do better when we try to do introductory explorations of "trauma"--we need to understand systems, not just singular events

I hate being vague, but also feel weird being explicit--but in particular I think of an experience I had when I was younger--I accidentally woke my grandfather up and I heard him getting out of bed and knew he was mad and was coming to get me and I just ran out the door,

barefoot, in pajamas, in the snow, and I ran and ran down the street while he chased me and I was faster than him, but not by much, and some people in a car stopped and asked if I needed help and I literally told them no, and eventually my grandmother drove by in her car

and got me, because he wasn't going to catch me and I was literally barefoot and running through the snow, and she took me home and I sat in my bed and I locked my bedroom door, but I k n e w I was just sitting there waiting for however long it took him to walk back to the house.

And I did. I lied down and actually put blankets and pillows over me because I k n e w. And he kicked the door down and moved the blankets and hit me. And there was no escape. There was almost an illusion of escape, but no real escape. So this is what I mean, I guess.

I mean, also: the house. I mean: the fact that I am living with someone who choked me unconscious. I mean: there is no escape. I mean: death sometimes looks like a good escape when all you know is No Escape. I mean: dissociation & oblivion sometimes seem like the next best thing.

I mean: resilience is, in fact, sometimes enduring more harm when there is no escape and your grandmother--who has never been hit--not only steps aside and let's it happen, but tells you it's your fault. I mean: resilience can be more than this, but so often, it is not.

I mean: yes, the history of the trauma lives in my body, but also, the house is the trauma. The present is the trauma. The No Escape is the trauma. The systems are the trauma. The Being Caught is the trauma. I mean: get me out of here. I mean: just drive me home in the snow.

this is clearly the beginning of a poem & I'm trying to make myself have the energy to write it. it's Right There. already the logics in this thread are like my poems--circular & turning in on themselves. the safety of "drive me home in the snow" but knowing what waits at home.