Healing Foundations
A post-election guide for white people on the left (and beyond) — Part II
November 8, 2020
Where do we begin? With ourselves.
We have an interim period in which to catch our breaths, to look around, look down, see where we are, see what we need, and to gather ourselves before we start putting in work.
I speak from my own experience of a long, ongoing — you might say chronic — trauma and the healing work I’ve done for myself. I also speak from the research I’ve done into evolutionary biology, neurodevelopment, and the physiology of trauma. So bear with me as I take a turn inward that you might not have expected.
I think many of us — especially non-men who are parents, gestators, caregivers, and kin-keepers — have heard a number of clichés about self-care. Let me share a couple that resonated with me, and you use them to assess where you are:
- “Put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others.”
This one resonated for me because it’s literally life-saving intervention, and the point is that if you don’t save yourself, you can’t save your kids (or whomever it is you care for).
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If this is where you are, embrace it. But be aware that this means you perceive yourself to currently be in crisis. As long as you are in crisis mode, healing is exponentially more difficult (not impossible, I’ve done it myself). However, please be aware that at all times your attention will need to be primarily on crisis-management, and doing the necessary self-work feels impossible but is no less necessary. - “You can’t pour out of an empty cup.”
I don’t love this one because of the way it is often used to metaphorize women and non-men pouring out themselves for others. However, if we think about the cup and its substance as not ourselves, but as our nourishment, then the metaphor rings a little more true (and more healthily). You must nourish yourself before you will have the energy to care for and nourish others.
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If this is where you are, congratulations, your crisis has passed and you are now in a position where healing work is much more accessible. It doesn’t mean your crisis or trauma was less serious, it just means that you aren’t having to divert loads of energy into healing it.
What you do for yourself will be different depending on which of those two statements resonated more for you. But it will all come down to first giving yourself the time and care you need. You must attend to your needs here, or you will either run out of oxygen (and die — in the metaphor, or maybe literally, if you’ve read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist) or you will run out of energy for community work. This has two consequences: 1. you will withdraw from the essential work of getting engaged and 2. you will end up exhausted and possibly resentful.
Everything we know from cognitive neuroscience and the physiology of trauma tells us that we must do our self-care work in order.
Foundations of Meeting Our Needs
If you’ve taken Psych 101 you may be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but did you also know that this order of addressing human needs also aligns with the evolutionary biology of our nervous systems and with the neurodevelopment of each individual human being from in utero to young adulthood? It also aligns with the theory of the chakras in the subtle body in the Indian tradition (FYI). It also absolutely obliterates the idea that “mind-over-matter” is an actually possible way for people to overcome trauma. You cannot bootstrap past the hierarchy or the nervous system.
So Step 1 in self-care is asking yourself if you’re meeting your own basic, physiological needs?
- Are you eating enough? Are you nourishing your body? Is the food you are consuming adding to your overall well-being (physical or emotional)?
- Are you hydrated?
- Are you taking your meds regularly?
- Are you getting enough sleep?
- Are you getting enough human touch?
- Do you go to the bathroom when you need to?
I will end this section with a personal story from when my daughter was in the NICU. I was overwhelmed with postpartum hormones and the lack of ability to hold and bond with my daughter while she was in an incubator. I met with the NICU social worker who gave me a tool for handling my suffering that I’ve used many times since. She suggested that I use the following steps:
- Acknowledge that I’m suffering. Recognize it. Give it a name. Give it a score, 1–10 of how intense it is.
- Remember that everyone suffers.
- Do for yourself what you would do for a kid having a melt down — have a snack, take a nap, go outside, move your body.
When she asked if I was taking care of myself, I said, “well yeah, I’m seeing a therapist and I’m taking medicine, and…” She cut me off. She asked me the most cutting question that sliced through my own internal rhetoric that was telling me I was caring for myself enough: “do you go to the bathroom when you need to?”
No. I didn’t. In fact, I’d had an excruciating incident the second night after my c-section because I needed to use the bathroom but I didn’t want to wake my partner to help me get there because they were so tired. So I went back to sleep. I woke up with a full bladder pressing against the wounds in my uterus and abdomen, crying and unable to sit upright. Even though I woke my partner I could no longer get out of the bed to the bathroom and ended up needing a team of three nurses to slide a Chux pad underneath me so that I could pee myself in my hospital bed in order to empty my bladder enough to make it to the bathroom.
Even after that incident, I had again held off on going to the bathroom when holding my daughter in the NICU because I knew it was the only chance I would have that day, and if I cut it short to go to the bathroom I wouldn’t get that time back.
So spend some time sitting with these questions. Are you really meeting your own needs? Putting on your own oxygen mask first? Filling your cup?
If the answer is “no,” or “I can do better,” make a plan for how to shift your routines and practices accordingly.
Addendum for Trauma Survivors:
Meeting our own needs gets very caught up in our feelings of worthiness of care. We may resist even the most fundamental of self-preserving behaviors — like eating appropriately, or taking our meds. It is imperative that you get appropriate, validating, professional support for doing this work.
Trauma gets hard-wired into our nervous systems and changes the way they operate, affecting our whole bodies. You cannot will, or think, or pray trauma and its effects away.
I had a great therapist who defined trauma as something that changes how we think(/feel) about ourselves (and/or our place in the world). It cuts to the core of our relationship to our very existence — even to our right to exist, or our reason for existing. It can come with very serious consequences ranging from dangerous outbursts of violent aggression to suicidal ideation, or even complete, catatonic dissociation.
This is a natural, adaptive, response in our nervous systems because it once would have helped us to stay alive under life-threatening circumstances. When we are unable to turn off the response because we can’t signal to our bodies that the danger has passed, it becomes maladaptive. We become hypervigilant, reactionary, defensive, rigid in our thinking. We are quick to fall into a trauma response — whether that’s escalating unnecessarily, fleeing a situation because it’s difficult or uncomfortable, or simply shutting down and stopping engaging. Any time we have a trauma response, we are incapable of doing connecting or healing work. Because our bodies are simply doing their best to keep us alive under a perceived threat.
Many of us have experienced the escalation of violence and extremism the last four years as a trauma. We need to acknowledge the effect that is having on our bodies and care for our bodies in such a way that allows us to put our guards down enough to do healing and community work.
Final Addendum for Survivors of Early Childhood Trauma:
The last note I will make in this exercise on self-care is dedicated to those who have experienced trauma before the age of three.
Because our nervous systems develop throughout childhood in the same order that they evolved, the age at which you first experience a serious trauma will affect how your nervous system responds to stress and perceived threat.
In evolutionary history, the vagus nerve, running from the brain stem down through the center of the body and into the viscera is the most primitive (meaning earliest to develop and least complex) part of the nervous system (see the work of Peter Levine and Stephen Porges). It runs all of your most basic functions of homeostasis — breath, heart rhythm, visceral regulation.
When we experience a trauma before the age of three, the vagus nerve is the most functional part of our nervous system, so it takes control of our stress response and becomes the part of our nervous system that runs our default stress response for the rest of our lives (unless or until we do purposeful trauma healing work).
The vagus nerve cannot help us fight or flee — because we are entirely dependent beings, often without motor control or self-sufficiency in any area. It therefore does the most basic form of survival/pain mitigation — it helps us to shut down entirely. In an evolutionary frame this makes sense: playing dead in the hopes that a predator will leave you is a survival adaptation. If that fails, then the vagus nerve has moved all your blood away from extremities and toward the viscera in an attempt to maintain survival under conditions of attack in which one is wounded. It has also flooded the body with pain-diminishing hormones, possibly to make it possible for a wounded creature to make live-saving movements with otherwise incapacitated bodies.
If you dissociate, stonewall, or go catatonic under stress, this may be you. What it means is that you experienced trauma at an age — possibly even at a pre-verbal stage — where that trauma changed your beliefs about yourself in the world from “I am safe, I can trust my caregivers to ensure my needs are met, I am going to survive” (the result of a secure, well-attached development from ages 0–3) to “I am not safe, I cannot trust anyone to meet my needs, and I am going to die” (the result of trauma, abuse, and/or neglect during ages 0–3).
If this is you, you are going to struggle to make/maintain interpersonal connections because you won’t trust anyone. Not only do I urge you to do work toward healing with a qualified therapist, but please also make a mental note of this aspect of how you interface with the world because it will affect the kind of work that you can do most effectively. It is imperative that, as you think about working toward a more just world you also equally prioritize maintaining your own sense of safety.
Know this: healing is possible, trust and love are possible, and meaningful work toward justice is possible.
