While out on a walk, letting my mind drift, things started to connect in my brain. What is happening in the world at the moment, my professional knowledge and my personal experiences came together to form what seems like a coherent answer to an apparently unanswerable question. I have posted this on LinkedIn, and want to share it here as well, where it doesn’t get buried as quickly.
When it feels like the world is crumbling the question that comes up again and again is: what would it take to achieve real, lasting peace? It can seem like a theoretical question, a mental exercise, but, having given it some thought, I believe there is a real answer and solution. It is a simple one, but not an easy one: Achieving peace requires ensuring that everyone receives help to recognise and resolve their trauma, in combination with truly universal social protection and access to basic services (this addition because as will be mentioned severe and long-term poverty is a significant stressor that can lead to a trauma experience).
This solution is not utopic and it does not stem from a naïve, bleeding-heart, communist fantasy. What has led me to this conclusion is the work and research I have done for close to two decades. I can predict a lot of the dismissive and hostile responses I may get to a post like this, and essentially they strengthen my argument. They will, more often than not, be reactive attacks – or in other words, trauma responses.
Trauma responses lead to lack of tolerance, to conflicts and tensions. With the aim to keep us alive the brain tries to hide the paralysing overwhelm of awareness of trauma from us. But being hidden, it is not gone. Physiological adaptations have been made to survive the traumatic experience and from its hiding place it directs our behaviour and reactions to try to ensure that we stay safe from the terrible things. Unfortunately, the results of the adaptations – useful as they were to survive the original experience – can have long term and wide ranging damaging and destructive effects.
To name a few common coping strategies/trauma responses:
• Striking first, ask questions later – whether at a personal or international level
• Feeling under constant threat and interpreting even neutral cues as negative or threatening
• Rejecting – and vilifying/attacking – anything unfamiliar and wanting to go ‘back’ to what seems simpler and more familiar
• Needing to control circumstances and other people to feel safer
• Feeling the need to ‘take care of our own’ first, to the exclusion of others
• Experiencing suppressed access to the parts of the brain involved in complex thinking, leaving the emotional parts of the brain that detect threat in charge
• Being unable to take in and process new information
• Feeling worthless and broken to the point where trampling on others (and dehumanising them) becomes the only way to not feel at the very bottom of any hierarchy.
Any of this sound familiar, relevant to what is happening in the world? Exactly! What we see around us, what looks like the world crumbling by and large is caused by trauma responses, which are very understandable when you look at the background of those striking out or digging their heels in.
When trauma is processed and resolved, the ability to see other people as human beings and communicating openly with others increases. With interaction prejudices and stigmas have an opportunity to crumble. With less reactive and aggressive responses, there is more space for communication and consideration of action. Leading to a reduction of polarisation, hostilities, and aggression. Altogether this leads to increased feelings of connection, belonging, and trust. These are all crucial to both individual well-being and peaceful coexistence. Any sustainable solution to conflict, cruelty, inequality and threats to democracy has to include a real push to help people recognise and address the existing traumas individually and collectively.
Trauma is more than having experienced an extreme and horrifying incident or period – this is sometimes called Trauma with a capital T. There is also trauma with a small t, which often goes unrecognised as ‘real trauma’. Small t trauma is an elevated stress level over a long period of time – sometimes someone’s entire life – that is so significant and persistent that it also leads to challenging physiological, psychological, and behavioural changes.
Examples of circumstances leading to small t trauma are:
• Trying to survive in severe poverty and food insecurity
• Being part of a marginalised community or group that experiences constant discrimination and lack of access to services and resources
• Growing up in a family where the older generations carry unresolved trauma
• Having your feelings and experiences invalidated because they are not in line with those of most people around you (for example those who are neuro- or gender-diverse or from cultural minorities).
Altogether the percentage of people who carry some form of trauma is extremely high. In fact, most people do. Not all trauma is equally scarring or debilitating, but it is important to realise that many more of us carry trauma than we realise and any unresolved trauma has a significant impact on our behaviour and responses to the world around us. If we want to work towards real peace, acknowledging the pervasiveness and impact of trauma is essential.
It is not always easy to recognise the presence of trauma. If you had asked me three or more years ago, I would have told you I was doing fine, no issues. Since then, I have come to understand how deeply I have been affected by issues in my family, which despite their love and best intentions and efforts left them unable to provide the psychological safety I needed. Combined with undiagnosed neurodiversity, I found I had quite a bit to work through to be less stressed and reactive as a default setting. Having done (and continuing to do) so, I am better able to reach out to other people and not disregard my own needs in the process. Mine can be considered a very mild case, very many people are dealing with much worse, whether or not they have realised it yet. Many people don’t understand why (or even that) they respond as explosively as they do, which stands in the way of peace.
This will be dismissed by many. Working on resolving trauma and providing social protection universally is not going to be embraced by governments and global institutions anytime soon. However, it is something that all of us can work on in ourselves, in the communities, businesses, and organisations we work and live in. We can allow the effects to spread from there. Any individual resolving their trauma and no longer passing it on to those around them is a step in the right direction and adds to the ripple effect. Those most damaged by their trauma are going to be most resistant to (and scared of) receiving help. Some will never allow their trauma to be addressed. But in the end, no one has eternal life. A critical mass of people recognising and resolving their trauma can build, and the journey towards real, lasting peace will build momentum and become unstoppable. This will not lead to some kind of dreamy utopia, but it can create the basic conditions for social and economic well-being and peaceful coexistence.
There is an answer, a solution, are you willing to hear and consider it?
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