Week 3: Traumatized?

Some thoughts on reclaiming your mind.

You may have noted, reader, that my Substack has a new name: Code Red: Process Notes of a Coup. My swerve from writing about the climate crisis to writing about the, say the word coup, in no way reflects any diminishment in my alarm about the health of the planet. Instead, I am, like many of us, so affected by the Great Shattering that I am unable to focus on anything but this existential danger, this lion with teeth bared standing before me, roaring. My eyes are wide open with horror, my heart is pounding, my mind is racing.

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

Since the Inauguration almost three weeks ago the pace of assault on our Democracy has quickened, the direction of fire is coming from everywhere, there is no corner that is safe, there is no place to hide. It is as if we are in a dash across an open field with gunfire aimed at us from every direction. But so far, instead of guns, the ammunition is digital data systems or mass firings or threats to immigrants and DEI personnel or withholding of funding from crucial programs that provide food and healthcare.

In Germany they threatened people with concentration camps and gas chambers and troops, threats that cost the government money and time. Here the threat is cheap and fast: hire 19 year olds with nicknames like Big Balls, cannibalize personal data, use it to intimidate the populace into submission.

"Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all."  Susan B. Glasser, Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror, New Yorker  

Say the word trauma.

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We want to put them in trauma."  Russel Vaught, newly appointed director of the Office of Management and the Budget.

Say the word traumatized.

This Trump/Musk knives-out rampage has done its job. I am traumatized. I find it hard to concentrate. I forget meetings and am so distracted I can’t keep track of whether my husband said he was going to the grocery store or a meeting or when he is coming home. Sometimes I suddenly start to weep and pace up and down the hall, chanting oh my god, oh my god. I lose my appetite. I wash the floors, my fallback coping mechanism when I feel overwhelmed. Worry nibbles at my sleep. I feel sick to my stomach.

I know many of you are also experiencing this set of feelings and cognitive unbalance best described as trauma. I urge you all to observe these feelings from this important perspective: trauma reactions are important sets of data wired into our neuropathways as warning signals that our safety and security are at risk. Without this wiring the lions would have eaten us all long ago. This data is our secret weapon. No one can steal that from us.

Basic trust and a sense of secure attachment are bedrock to our mental functioning. We have, if we are lucky, an experience of trust and attachment to parents and grandparents when we are children which, as we grow older, we can put in our backpacks and bring with us into the world. When that bedrock is lost or threatened we experience a set of physical and cognitive conditions called trauma.

Our country is a lot like a family. We derive a sense of basic trust from a secure attachment to our country. Belonging to the family of America has, predominantly, given me the feeling of being in a safe place with good-enough parents whose actions I can predict. Now my country’s parents are craven narcissists who have no regard for my safety or anyone’s but their own and are standing inside our home, breaking things.

How we handle this data about the risks to our safety and security now will have everything to do with whether or not we can mobilize our defense against this threat. Trauma can be harnessed to action for change or it can be crippling and lead us to turn away, barricade our mind to the extent of the danger and settle oneself in a more comfortable chair, like the ones Republicans are sitting in. Susan B. Glasser’s piece in the New Yorker this week describes the Republican dissociative response well:

Speaker Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, dismissed the furor over Musk’s power play as “gross overreaction in the media.” Perhaps the most perfect distillation of where elected Republican officials are at right now came from the North Carolina senator Thom Tillis. Asked about what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

There are many psychological consequences of trauma but the one that concerns me most at this moment is one called dissociation. Dissociation is one of the most common mental adaptations to trauma. In dissociation the mind diminishes the sounds, the colors, the emotional tone of a threatening or disturbing event. Derealization is another word to describe what happens in dissociation. It is a deadening of the senses, a way of seeing things without attributing feeling to those things. In its extreme it accounts for multiple personality disorder.

I was once a pro at dissociation, not because I specialized in it in my mental health career, but because I lived it. It’s a long story that began when I was a child faced with the crushing emotional loss of a once very loving mother to a deep depression that left her unavailable to me. Dissociation was the ship I leapt into to weather the loss. I didn’t choose that coping mechanism. I wasn’t the least bit aware of my great facility at it until years later when it was too late to turn to her and say I was sorry for abandoning her by not helping with my younger brothers and sisters whom I blamed for her depression, for not staying more connected to her over the years.

Many people my age were very actively engaged in the 60’s civil rights marches and anti-war protests. In 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was living on the South Side of Chicago and attending Grad School in Social Work at the University of Chicago. Street protests were everywhere. Whole neighborhoods burned. SDS shut down the entire University for weeks. Was I part of that protest? Moved enough to answer the call to join SDS or Civil Rights marches? No. I was in that mildly dissociated state I’d mastered so well as a child. It saddens me now to say that I felt no emotional pull to act. I watched from a distance, as if from the top of a mountain.

This time there will be no turning away for me. This time I will have no regrets for my failure to show up.

As an old pro at dissociation, I urge you to be on guard for that sneaky little veil of unreality that will blind you not to the facts but to the extent of the horror of this moment and leave you in the comfort of your home, shades drawn, rarely peeking out the window to experience the pain around you, telling yourself this will pass, there’s nothing you can do, it’s not so bad, we have to wait it out, maybe some good will come of it, and furthermore, where’s the chocolate?

Last week I wrote about acts of care for immigrants or others affected by the cruelty of this government as acts of resistance. This week I want to look at how being cared for yourself helps to heal the dissociation the Musk/Trump team hopes to achieve by their assault on our basic sense of trust and security.

If I could write a prescription for the symptom of dissociation it would be for you to restore your sense of safety and security and attachment by allowing yourself both to care and to be cared for. Tell friends or co-workers you are feeling traumatized and unsteady. “I am having a really hard time with all this,” is a good opening line. Don’t be alone as much. Hang out in places that make you feel safe. Contact old friends. Go to local community events. Make pacts with your friends to check in on each other. Find people you trust and stay away from the ones you don’t.

Our culture is very big on the idea of self care. Do we even have a word for mutual care? We are a society that values the individual and independence and autonomy. In this we have, I believe, lost something. The rates of loneliness in this country are very high. So are the rates of depression.

Maybe one good thing that will come of this crisis is that we will all recognize how much we need each other and how important it is to care for each other. Signs of that are beginning to happen.

I belong to a weekly bridge group and when we met last Monday night many of us were eager to share our experiences of the week before. We gasped and bemoaned our fates. We nodded our heads in agreement and shook our heads in disbelief. We hugged each other. We said how grateful we are to have each other now in the face of ALL THIS.

Then on Tuesday night our Town Council pledged to care for the safety and well being of our community. Sitting a few feet above us in their big council chairs positioned in a long row so that they all looked out at us, they spoke passionately about care as a value prized by our community. Several told very personal stories about how that care had helped to overcome personal fears of their own. In the back row, the Police Chief sat quietly, witnessing this pledge. I squeezed his shoulder on the way out as a way to express my thanks for his coming.

On Wednesday I gathered in Portland in the lobby of One Canal Plaza with about fifty other people organized by Indivisible to first visit the office of Senator Collins and then walk around the corner to Senator King’s office. Our message to Collins: don’t vote for Vought for OMB. Our message to King: speak out, use your facility as a writer and orator to make a mark on this moment. Make us proud.

On Friday King did just that: spoke courageously and eloquently and made us proud. Would he have had the courage to speak if we the people had remained silent? My guess is he needs us as much as we need him.

Since then my head has been a bit clearer, my stomach a little calmer, my sleep less nibbled at in the night by monsters.

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NOTE!! Even the New York Times woke up this morning to the danger of this moment as this piece, titled, Now Is Not the Time to Tune Out, in today’s Opinion section reveals.