Safety, Autonomy and Trauma
Over years of working with people who suffer immense trauma, working with them to overcome this trauma and find freedom, I have discovered a few fairly simple principles that facilitate this healing process.
For context I have spent years working with people across youth work, in child protection residential care and in residential care for refugees.
There are many kinds of trauma caused by different contexts, but all versions of extreme trauma include learned helplessnes.
In my experience in every case, there is a key to healing.
Providing a safe loving environment in which the person who experiences learned helplessnes can play, experiment and develop a sense of autonomy, mastery and independence is key.
This play, experimentation, autonomy and mastery, must be in the specific area of human experience that the person learned that they could not play, they could not experiment, they could not have autonomy and they could not have mastery.
Many people may not know this, but on my journey to healing I had a great many areas of learned helplessnes. A big area of learned helplessnes for me was feeling that I was powerless when other humans would misjudge me unintentionally or intentionally and would create an identity for me, by gossiping about me and gaslighting me and would then tell others or me that my identity is a certain thing that they made up.
I have had many times in my life when I felt like people who knew me had this picture of me that was completely and utterly false. At different times of my life that put me in a place of learned helplessnes. I felt like I had no power to change this and that I would then have to become this false identity that the gossips had created about me.
There were many layers to this learned helplessnes. Firstly I did not know how to have the confidence to actually tell my own story, to speak my own perspective, to speak what I felt was my own truth.
Secondly I did not have the confidence to maintain an internal identity based on my own truth and perspective. I had so little self confidence that I would actually believe the words of the gossips, words that were completely false pictures of me, but then I would start to make them true about me.
To heal from this I went on a journey of playfully creating new identities and then telling the story of each of those identities and learning so that I can have confidence to tell my own story.
At many times I didn't actually know who I was anymore.
Since primary school, I have rarely felt like I know who I am, because I would just fall into becoming the identity that each person or group thought that I was or wanted me to be.
So in each social setting I became what the other person wanted me to be. In each setting I would feel more and more misunderstood and unseen as the other person related to the version of me that I thought that they wanted, and the real me was trapped inside feeling desperately hurt that no one would notice it and care for it or understand it.
This was a subconscious process. Something I was largely unaware of, it was the only way my psyche knew to interact with the world to avoid being terribly attacked by verbal abuse that would tell me that I am a worthless human who should go and die. Three years of being passionately told this every day at school leaves long lasting scars on the psyche.
Its been a journey of over 20 years learning to develop a sense of self that is true to me and feels authentic.
It has been a journey of over 20 years learning to overcome the power of gossip by learning to tell my own story. Learning to explore my heart and subconscious so that I can know who I actually am and what makes me feel authentic and real. Then learning how to communicate this in different languages and contexts, from direct speech, to metaphorical poetry.
It has been a journey of over 20 years of practicing, playing, experimenting in a safe environment, creating new identities in roleplaying games and different social settings, experimenting with being bold and outspoken, when I used to be timid and fearful. Experimenting with being decisive and exercising leadership and authority over groups, when I used to fear and avoid groups. Then playing and learning to exist in groups and maintain my identity without having leadership of the group.
This is a little snippet of my journey.
But the bigger picture is that I believe a similar journey of learning to play, experiment, gain autonomy and mastery in the specific areas of life that one has a sense of learned helplessnes is necessary for everyone who has a sense of learned helplessnes in an area of their life.
How can we as a community provide a safe and caring environment for people to play, experiment, development autonomy and mastery?
If we want to allow our friends, our community and our society to heal then we need to let them play and experiment in a safe environment.
If they don't have access to a safe environment in which they are free to play and explore then they cannot heal or discover themselves.