“Why are we not talking about the neurological consequences of failed and malicious state responses? If we were really thinking about the brain, shouldn’t that be part of the discourse?” — Allan Wade
Some quotes from the video:
(15:59) The trauma industry sits alongside the colonial code in the helping relations.
(19:30) …brain science is not settled. It has ignored social and environmental responses, culture and context.
(20:56) The initial idea of trauma-talk (“It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you”) has now reverted back to “What happened to you is what’s wrong with you.”
(26:16) Why are we not talking about the neurological consequences of failed and malicious state responses? If we were really thinking about the brain, shouldn’t that be part of the discourse?
Instead, what happens is we look narrowly at an adverse event which is unfortunately now called a trauma. We now don’t talk so much about violence or the nature of the actual event, what we now talk about is trauma. So we’re no longer talking about perpetrator’s actions, we’re talking about inferences in the minds / bodies / brains of people who are victimized. It’s very neat shift in focus from the actions of perpetrators, to the insides of victims.
Once you make that shift, you no longer have to talk about the actions of perpetrators, and the responsibility of failed institutional responses is minimized and reduced. And then the attribution of PTSD or “you have trauma” or “you have anxiety related to trauma” just gets continued unchecked.
So we have a lot more to do in terms of publicising and examining institutional responses.
In what planet does it make sense that lawyers, medical doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, etc., get virtually no training on understanding interpersonal violence, when on the other hand the very same governments are investing so heavily in the trauma discourse? On what planet really does that make any sense at all?
So who’s responsible for deciding that medical doctors don’t need to understand violence? Or that school teachers don’t need to understand violence when 30% of kids transiting the school system will experience violence on their way through, and there’s enough violence on school playgrounds, particularly now that children are inundated with porn violence images.
So who is it that makes the decisions about what curriculums are created for professionals? These are elite educated people who are controllers of our public institutions. They’re not indigenous people.
(53:06) The misuse of psychological testing in the family law arena, where women who’ve been subjected to violence are attempting to protect their kids protective mothers are turned into alienating mothers in about 10 minutes flat. And suddenly somebody who’s been really struggling for a lifetime to find peace and safety and justice, and to raise their kids, is suddenly now “the perpetrator” of violence against their ex-partner who is abusive and their children. So we find the use of psychological instruments and the DSM — all of which stem from the false view that you can understand the suffering of another person without understanding the context of their life.
As soon as you begin to acknowledge that people do resist violence, the basic assumptions of the trauma framework (fight, flight, freeze, dissociate, submit) begin to fall apart like a house of cards: they’re simply not sustainable because they’re not based on any observation about how people actually respond.
Instead of “trauma informed practice,” we advocate for safety informed practices or dignity informed practices.
I think it was in this video that Cathy Richardson said, “There is nothing more violent than systemic violence.”
Kindred System, who contributes this blog, talks about no-touch state violence. The erased mothers who read this blog know what she’s talking about.
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