trauma - poisons - healing

i've just been reading this quite beautiful article: Dark Medicines: On Seeing Patients with Bad Habits. 

i've been thinking about being a domestic violence support worker as being a healer. about me having been a healer and having ended up quite broken from the work. about what i need to heal. i've been reading blogs by creative holistic herby healer types, mainly queer, all in the US as is often the way with these things (who are you, european ones?)

kirsten hale

dori midnight 

i've got some work supporting another gendered violence organisation to deal with vicarious trauma / burnout / compassion fatigue among their staff. and just trying to come up with the workshop is bringing up what i know nowadays are my own trauma symptoms.laurie perlman has some things to say about vicarious transformation - how healers can and must transform through trauma. the work will always change us so we must find our own ways to ground ourselves and stay connected in our own transformations. it sounds like a nice way to frame it. she's right. but how to stay on this healthier path?

i wish there was a culture of even thinking about supporting survivors as being healing work. and a culture of supporting us as healers. i wish it wasn't wildly far out for me to be seeking wisdom from holistic practitioners to bring back to this normie voluntary sector work. i wish all my colleagues weren't broken and we could support each other. i wish we could talk about how dwelling in violence and trauma seeps into us and what we need to do about it.

about the magic

i dreamed about one of my ex-clients last night. there was some kind of party at my mum's house and i think a few women i used to work with were there, but she was the only one i talked to properly. she seemed quite a lot more sorted and had stopped drinking. i was impressed that she had decided to come to a party despite struggling with alcohol. she is glamorous in real life, and was looking really good for the party. i don't remember much else but i do wonder what on earth my subconscious is doing with all the 'material' it's amassed over the past seven years working. i kind of imagined that i'd have this process of processing it, and that i'd have this wonderful sense of gaining perspective on it all. but it seems to be hiding, or maybe this is how it's going to trickle out.

it's so so odd, having had one-sided, intimate involvement in key changes in so many people's lives. and so so odd to think that all of those memories are still in me, although i don't consciously remember them. i sorely wish that this kind of thing, this odd, magical, privileged, disturbing, part of the job was talked about in my office, in what little training we had, or even on the smokebreaks, but... nothing. having to deal with several realities, and deal with my colleagues pretending everything is normal, makes me feel crazy (another reason i had to leave). but if they won't talk about the magic, well, i still know the magic's there.

what will you do with your wellness?

well it wasn't all that dramatic really, quitting work, i'll be going back as an occasional fill-in worker, and i did this for the first time yesterday. mmph. it's weird, seeing the job after 10 weeks away.

it seemed so hectic, although i only saw two 'clients'. one was the ideal, heartwarming, afternoon session. she had had some support from us before, she was now ready to leave. she had her information, she had her plan. we talked it through, though she had it all sorted and didn't need me to validate it. i wished her luck and off she went. i sighed inside, feeling lucky to be able to come back and get paid to do this, thinking ah... this is a nice job.

the second was a woman i've talked to before on the phone. things are better for her now than then. she has been through extreme and prolonged abuse and is very traumatised. in some ways she's kind of 'difficult to work with' because of the trauma. if she's not happy with the service she goes on about it. she's trying to get her needs met after a childhood, and a decade in adulthood, of having her needs obliterated. when she first came yesterday, and was angry about the service, i was alarmed for my safety for about the third time in all the years i've worked for the service. i realised i'd forgotten to unlock the other door to the room that i'm supposed to use to get out if necessary - the same thing had happened once before and i'd been trapped in the same room with an angry client shouting in my face.

but she soon calmed down and i realised i'd overreacted, i guess i'm out of practice having been away. she stayed and talked for ages. she mentioned that another service in the town had just been in touch again, many months after their first phonecall, and she'd had to tell her story all over again, to yet another professional. i remembered, though i didn't feel i should tell the woman, that the service had said they couldn't visit her until they had done their risk assessment, due to this woman having mental health issues. and i thought how totally the other service would be freaking out now, as she's standing up in room with only one unlocked door, being angry, and i'm a lone worker. the other service would not only have unlocked the damn door, they would send two workers at once, and they haven't even agreed to meet the woman yet due to feeling she's a risk to them and need to do some massive form over the phone to see whether she's too crazy. and in the mean time who works with these crazy women? they are 'crazy' because that's what happens when you are abused, abuse is a crazy thing to happen. it's so important to work with the crazy women! and very few people are really very mad if you listen and try to see where they're coming from and what they need. anyway, i'm glad my service hasn't got itself together yet to the extent that it excludes 'crazy' women. i mean, if i told my manager about this session, she'd want to 'put in place measures for workers' protection' but she's not got around to it, thank goodness.

i really enjoyed the session and i felt good that the woman was staying and finding it useful and that i had the knowledge to refer her to services and groups and books and other things that can help her. she didn't want to access mental health services for PTSD in case she was misdiagnosed and pathologised and i thought this was very wise. i feel desperate for women i work with who are so traumatised to access support for this but it is now impossible without sending them for a general mental health assessment - this freaks me out for exactly the reason this woman was wary of it. people act all kinds of crazy following trauma, and can then get diagnosed with all kinds of disorders, when maybe all they need is acknowledgement that they've been abused, support to safely remember what's happened, for the opposite of the traumatising things to start happening (for example, for their needs to start being met), and support to understand their 'crazy' symptoms as normal and natural responses to abuse so they are less overwhelming. (hey, read especially Judith Herman and perhaps also Dorothy Rowe if yr interested in this stuff)

so yeah and then last night after work i didn't know what to do with myself. i was carrying trauma, already, after only one proper session at work. i feel better this morning, writing, and maybe if i could make myself debrief religiously every time i might not get fucked up. dammit, i love this work. and i know i have a lot to give. but last night i was fighting with myself thinking it's fucking you up, you're traumatised by proxy. and then i was thinking well the understandable thing to do would be to stop doing this work. but then it really does feel like it's my role in life, it's what i do, it's what i'm good at, it's what i've studied and am fascinated by, i can't stop now. and anyway, what right do i have to hole myself up away from trauma? as someone who has been through no seriously traumatising experiences, and a very low amount of the regular, in-society traumas, who carries a huge amount of non-traumatised privilege, i am protecting myself from trauma at the expense of more traumatised people, because i can, and this is as unacceptable as protecting any other kind of privilege.

if i open up my energy to people and support them in the healthiest possible way (which i'm committed to figuring out) then this goes a tiny way to redistributing trauma. i haven't seen this talked about before but it's very imporant to me. we challenge our right to comfort at others' expense, but often defend our decision to turn one's back on trauma and traumatised people - i haven't seen a discussion of privilege in the discourse around supporting. of course i'm not arguing that i should go out and try to get myself mentally scarred for the sake of it. no, what i mean is - if i can be useful with the extra energy that i don't have to spend dealing with nightmares, flashbacks, anger, panic attacks and so on, then i should be! what am i going to do with my wellness? how can i use my wellness most usefully, and maximise it, in order to maximise the wellness of others?

tired.

argh. back to work after a little time off and i can feel the unhealthy symptoms in me already. this is fucked up! it's like i can get on a roll when i'm working hard for weeks on end and don't notice so much but returning after (not enough) time off feels awful.

is there a healthy way to do this work? is the idea of there being certain people whose role it is to support survivors of domestic abuse just inherently fucked up?

i can feel that this is doing some damage, that i'm slowly burning out, that when i finally grind to a halt i'm going to need to do some work on myself to unpick what it's done to my mind and habits and by extension my health. i don't have the same energy for the work at all any more, and as soon as i started to admit this to myself the tiredness came on worse. we can ask for a few counselling sessions when things really get a bit much (clinical/therapeutic supervision really needs to be part of our work, but it ain't) and i did so recently. the counsellor pointed out to me that when i started doing this i was six years younger and full of youthful (and naive) feminist drive which has almost run dry. she said that every woman i'd supported had "taken a little bit" of energy from me and, obviously, not given it back. hmm. a strange model, a strange thing to do. is there any other way?

yes, communities should have this knowledge. it's not rocket science. i have got a really good understanding of this stuff after six years but to believe in 'experts' in this field, especially non-survivor 'experts' like myself, is pretty Wrong. to return to the quote that i started this blog with:

"I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist. i am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines..."

Rebecca Farr of CARA, in The Revolution Starts at Home zine produced by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

and what's more, and bearing in mind that voluntary sector DV work is emphatically not activism, it is nonetheless supposedly about creating change: 

"The 'activist' is a specialist or an expert in social change - yet the harder we cling to this role and notion of what we are, the more we actually impede the change we desire. A real revolution will involve the breaking out of all preconceived roles and the destruction of all specialism - the reclamation of our lives. The seizing control over our own destinies which is the act of revolution will involve the creation of new selves and new forms of interaction and community. 'Experts' in anything can only hinder this."

From Give Up Activism zine.

forced debrief

this blog is supposed to be for debriefing, which is just as much a part of looking for patterns as my newfound excitement in book reading and intellectualising. sometimes i have to force myself to tug out already half-buried memories of what i've been told recently. ok. so. what's got to me this week?

child sexual abuse. always knocks me. it's too much a part of too many people's stories. it's not what i'm a support worker for, and i never encourage women to talk about it. they almost never do in detail, only in passing to provide context. and considering i never ask specifically, there is probably a whole undersea iceberg of child sexual abuse as context that i don't hear about. i actually can't immediately bring to mind how it's fitted in this week. which i guess is unhealthy. i just remember a sense of anger and overwhelm while on the phone and during a face-to-face session, both this week. come on.

ok. the anger and overwhelm was to do with how ridiculously, unbearably, far-reaching a single act of abuse can be. ah yeah i remember now. a woman was telling me as a side-note that her mother had been raped as a young woman and how this had caused her serious mental health problems which had caused the woman speaking to me to become her mother's carer and how this had impacted on her education, life-chances, confidence and ultimately contributed to her being in an abusive relationship for multiple decades. this brought to mind something i read years ago in Inga Muscio's book, Cunt, which i shall go and dig out... (jeez, doing that link i've just seen that the second edition only has a foreword by derrick jensen! that dude gets everywhere)... yes, she's writing about the affect on her and her sister's childhoods and lives, of her mother having been raped by a stranger aged nine:

"A man could, feasibly, sacrifice his coffee break raping a woman [child. she was nine.].
That woman would then spend her entire life dealing with it.
So would her daughters.
So would theirs.
This distibution of power is not acceptable."

i'm sure there are other things lurking in my unconscious from these first days back at work, but that'll do for now i guess.

too personal

ach, i've been neglecting this blog even though everything's swirling round my head as much as ever. trauma, abuse and relationships ending seem to be affecting me in ways too close to home to blog about just now. writing here was starting to help a lot, drawing out themes, categorising things so it's not such a messy heap of painful stuff. you can start to be less overwhelmed if you get scary things in some kind of order, right?

i'm totally noticing what happens if i don't prioritise support for myself though. like, one of the points of this blog was to figure out how to be a healthy supporter, and i'm feeling a bit unhealthy now. noticing this is a start, but acting on it would be better.

hey, though, on a random note, i found out about Activist Trauma Support who seem super cool to me and have brilliantly-worded resources to download. it's so hard to persuade people (myself included) to take a break from this kind of work, and they put the case so well.

i fully intend to make space in my life for more time writing here cos it's good for me. back soon.