In the last few days, I have been spending some time on social media on a page where there was a heated discussion about the war between Israel and Palestine. The creator of the page was trying with his content to bring the flags of the two countries together and put them side by side in a picture. A man from Palestine commented in anger stating how one can support a killer with a picture like that. I chimed in to say that the page creator was trying to bring peace and acknowledge both countries. The man made a polite enough but heated comment to me and I responded that of course I am pro Palestine but also we need to see the humans behind the politics and governments and yada yada yada. And as I pressed the “post” button in that comment, It hit me like a ton of bricks. I paused and I got a sense of myself in that exact moment. It was an autumn Friday morning and I was sitting comfortably in my rocking chair in my earth coloured living room, taking small sips of warm coffee. The early November sunshine was playing with my curtains and coming through, illuminating all the corners of the room. I was content, I was at peace and I was preaching world peace to a man across the world who saw his children and friends being slaughtered every second of his day.
At that moment I stopped and I pondered on the state of our world and I am aware, dear friend, that even that is a luxury and a privilege in our messed up, divided, cruel for so many, world. How is it that we can absolutely not touch, at times, the state of empathy for another human being whose experience has been so different from our own? And how can we, the “privileged” of this earth, expand our conscious minds and open our human hearts enough to feel this potion of magic that empathy is, the one that can make us whole as humans and help us love one another to the highest degree? I use my empathetic body all the time in my work, with my clients and yet it is so easy to miss it at crucial moments. We are all imperfect humans after all.
That conversation made me think of trauma. The horror and trauma the Palestinians are going through at the moment are unimaginable to the average human, but most of us have gone through traumatic events in our lives. Most of us have been hurt, have been betrayed, have been abused or ridiculed or received some type of aggression or exclusion or or or. We all have experienced the effects of trauma piercing our tender human hurts. Most of us have developed ways from a very early age to cope with the pain of trauma. Dissociation, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, depression are some of the milder ones perhaps. Then we have those coping ways that were weaved in our ways of being. Here come personality disorders, narcissism and more severe mental health conditions like borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia and so many more. Trauma is in the foundation of our darkest human moments and our darkest human behaviors. The dark, muddy waters of trauma are carried in our human bodies and hearts and they make living difficult and heavy, until we decide that we can’t live like that anymore.
Trauma is a scattered body which in order to survive has to shut down and forget. The pieces are everywhere. They are all those parts of ourselves that were in so much pain, so alone, so brutalized, so shocked and unable to be with what was going on for them, that they had to leave. They had to hide in dark corners deep in our subconscious minds.
My work as a therapist is to “see” and be with those parts of my clients that have been traumatized and potentially hiding for a very long time. This is the point where different parts of the self come into the room. The inner child, the angry teenager, the tender young self that lost trust and belief in the world and the humans around them. With empathy and gentleness we allow those parts to sit with us in the room, to breathe, to be, to speak, to express themselves. And moment after moment after moment to believe again that the world is a safe place. That It is okay to be your wonderful, awkward, quirky, funny, serious, imaginative, creative, angry and opinionated self in this world. There is space here for all of it. From a place of safety, we can be ourselves in the world. We can play, imagine, create, think freely, grow and develop. These are the very things that trauma steals away from us.
If I could go back and reframe my response to the Palestinian man, that would be “I see you. My heart bleeds for the pain and brutality you experience. I am sitting with your pain dear human and I am here for you”.
So much love and a bleeding heart for the humans of Palestine
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