STEP 3 —
addressing trauma
the science of oppression
Illustration by Kai Arnn
SELF-CARE AND COLLECTIVE-CARE LIVE IN THE BODY—AND SO DOES TRAUMA.
where does trauma influence your work?
Trauma is the body's response to an event it perceives as life-threatening or terrifying. Essentially, anything that is too much, too fast, too soon, too long or too little can lead to trauma.
Trauma is not just the event itself but also the person’s experience and emotional response to the event that lead to a post-traumatic stress response. Two people might experience the same event and respond very differently, to the point where one might experience post-traumatic stress and the other might not based on each one’s protective and risk factors, experience of and emotional response after the event.
The body plays a key role in a person’s response to trauma. Trauma is at its core an experience of powerlessness—of not having the power to keep oneself safe.
The body did not have the experience of being able to protect itself and when this happens, trauma responses become stored in the body’s tendons, sinews, muscles, nervous system and organs.
You may experience inflammation, digestive issues, recurring illness, muscle stiffness, or pain (among other ailments). It may feel hard to trust your body and your body might activate from zero to one hundred in the blink of an eye. It may feel hard to trust your body, as though it betrayed you.
The brain is also actively involved in a person’s trauma response. When a person experiences something profoundly scary, the brain and body reacts by:
Activating the amygdala (the brain’s fear center)
Inhibiting the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for executive functioning including attention, judgment and impulse control)
Inhibiting the hippocampus (the brain structure that encodes and stores memory)
Stress hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline, and norepinephrine are secreted
Heart rate increases and intensifies
Blood pressure, blood sugar, and inflammatory protein levels increase
The protective mobilization of nutrients occurs and blood flow patterns to the brain change
These reactions happen so quickly to mobilize the body to keep itself safe that most of the time, they have occurred and we have responded before we are even consciously aware of what happened.
Below are just some of the longer-term impacts that trauma has on the nervous system and the brain:
Trauma causes epigenetic changes via gene methylation. These changes don’t necessarily change a person’s genes but change how those genes are expressed, particularly those involved in the stress response and physical health. These epigenetic changes can be passed down to one’s children as an intergenerational footprint of trauma,
The hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) shrinks.
Reduced gray matter in key areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (the brain’s fear processing center).
Overactivation of the microglial cells which then release neurochemicals that lead to neuroinflammation and destroy neurons as well as leading to chronic inflammation.
Trauma ages people at a cellular level by eroding telomeres (the protective caps which sit at the end of DNA strands and keep the genome healthy and intact). Their erosion increases the likelihood of diseases.
Decreased GABA (Gaba-Aminobutyric Acid). GABA helps people feel relaxed and calm.
Weaker connections between the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampus and amygdala which can lead to an increased likelihood of mental health challenges.
What is important here is that trauma has long-standing and pervasive impacts on the body and the brain. It transforms us and puts us in a constant state of fear and reactivity that is outside of our awareness and our control.
Trauma also comes in many forms. It can be acute (one event that happens once), chronic (a similar type of trauma that reoccurs over a period of time), or complex (exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events that continue to occur over a prolonged period of time). Complex trauma can happen interpersonally, but many marginalized people experience it systemically. Threats to one's life doesn't have to be physical or happen all at once, and systemic oppression and discrimination such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia are examples of threats to one's life that are legislated into society as well occurring interpersonally.
Your personal traumas may have been the spark that called you into movement work or creative cultural art-making.
It may be what keeps you going when the work is frustrating and feels hopeless. It may be deeply healing to transform your trauma into action, and yet we cannot ignore the profound impacts that it has on our spirits, bodies, and ways of being and feeling safe with others.
some forms of trauma may be personal—while others may present in a community due to shared experiences of a system.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are childhood experiences of trauma (emotional/physical/sexual abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, etc) that are directly linked with long-term health impacts in adulthood, both mental and physical. More recently, research has added to the list of risk factors—it now includes racism, bullying, community violence and growing up in foster care. This underlines how ACEs play a huge role in maintaining systemic oppression, particularly in the way they sustain ableist power dynamics and disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
Groups who are more likely to experience ACEs are ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ individuals and people living with less access to education or below the poverty line.
We can’t talk about disability justice without talking about trauma. ACEs are also connected to social outcomes like unemployment, socioeconomic status, and other markers of privilege and access to systemic power. Therefore, we also can’t talk about capitalism or poverty without talking about trauma.
what can trauma responses look like?
Many of us have likely heard of “fight or flight,” but did you know there are three more common stress responses? Here they are, defined:
Fight – Just how it sounds, this response to trauma is active, reactionary, and may even be aggressive.
Flight – Folks responding in this way are trying to find the exit and get as far away from the scary thing as possible. They may choose not to engage and remove themselves from a situation until they are regulated enough for resolution.
Fawn – As the name suggests, this stress response is akin to becoming as sweet as a baby deer, doing your best to calm everyone down and reach a sense of safety again. This could manifest as people pleasing, physical affection, and flattery.
Freeze – Have you ever been in an argument and found that you weren’t able to articulate yourself as clearly as you want to? For some reason, you’re so overwhelmed and flooded by adrenalin that you’re unable to respond. This is one way we can freeze under stress. Sometimes it looks like shutting down, becoming unresponsive, or even dissociating and forgetting where we are.
Dissociate – Sometimes stressful situations are so intense that our brains literally force us out of our body to avoid having to experience all of the emotional or physical pain. Afterward, this could lead to us being unable to remember entire events in extreme instances, or for things to feel like they happened to someone else or in a dream.
Illustration by Kai Arnn
why do we need to be mindful of when/where/how trauma responses show up within our work?
The personal is political. For many of us, we are called into justice work because of our personal experiences with injustice. We tell our stories, amplify those of others, and fight to impact policies that could reduce human suffering so that other people and families don’t have to endure what we have survived.
But when we are in the work because of our pain, it also means that our somatic reactions to the traumas that brought us here are woven into the sinews, tendons, muscles and nerves in our bodies. In our social justice work, we find ourselves continually confronting the same topics, themes, images and stories that have hurt us.
Taking power over these stories and using our voices for change can be deeply healing, but continually leaning into confronting these narratives means that the work itself can be wrought with triggers. A meeting can be deeply activating when it hits too close to home. Public experiences when faced with possibilities of violence or lack of social safety can cause huge amounts of re-traumatization to our nervous systems.
Additionally, when individuals come together to work towards a common goal, they are not always going to agree on how to achieve it. Disagreements and conflicts will arise. Brains and bodies regularly respond to conflicts and threats of social rejection with fight, flight, freeze or dissociate responses (as though they were life-threatening events).
It’s important to be mindful of trauma when designing or facilitating community work in creative and cultural spaces.
When you add previous trauma into the mix, conflicts are likely to escalate more quickly and become explosive. Sometimes the damage is irreparable and can lead to conflict in movement spaces within groups of people who re-traumatize, activate, ostracize and push people to leave the community.
*IS ANGER A TRAUMA RESPONSE?
Anger is an emotion that has become taboo and vilified, but when we break it down, anger is simply a funnel emotion for sorrow. When one experiences anger, they are really experiencing a more activated and raw version of sadness and hurt. Often we are told to temper ourselves, silence ourselves and ignore our anger.
Societal narratives take this further and tell us that people of color are dangerous when angry (think of culturally analyzed stereotypes like the “angry Black man” and “angry Black woman,” for example).
White supremacy culture and other cultures of harm often teach us that only certain people are allowed to be angry. (For example, in the Collective-Care Club that led to this guide, someone shared their personal observation that a White person in a certain space was able to raise their voice and complain and still be seen as a go-getter, while a person of color showing the same behaviors was labeled threatening and aggressive.)
Examining our relationship to our own anger is important because at the end of the day, anyone engaged in social justice work is doing so out of some kind of anger at viewing the injustice in the world. Anger has a place and a vital role in justice work—it motivates us, spurs us to act instead of remaining apathetic, and helps us enforce important boundaries for ourselves and others.