To Heal a Nation (or a Heart)

Reconciling with History

About a year ago, I started trauma therapy. At that moment, I was a mess. I’d gotten sober in the middle of the pandemic, spent almost two years inside with two young kids as their sole provider and caregiver, and watched the seven figure business I had built from the ground up over a decade gradually disappear into dust. 

I have a long and storied trauma history that compounded the experiences of this more recent, more universal trauma. And I entered trauma therapy feeling like nothing I had ever done had worked, like I was broken, and like this was the final chance to just get some relief.

What I wanted, in the end, was to just feel better, but my hopes were not high. However, I made one really solid choice: I purposefully chose someone who specialized in trauma-based treatment, including EMDR.

Now, if you don’t know what EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprogramming) is, it’s something that I’ve come to refer to as brain magic. In essence, after months of preparation, your highly trained therapist asks you to focus on an act of trauma, and then through a series of eye movements that mimic what happens to us in REM sleep, tricks your brain into opening up the places where it stores that memory and its effects.

What bursts forth in this process are long-buried wells of emotion, decades old, as well as all the stories that your brain has told you about the why of it that may or may not be the totality of the circumstances, and then, finally, after an hour or so of this, a broader view of the why of what happened, a sort of completion with the trauma and the event.

The mind is an amazing thing, and neuroplasticity is miraculous.

My first experience with EMDR concerned a trauma that occurred when I was just eighteen months old. Through the process of EMDR, I suddenly saw my mother, the person who had perpetrated it, not as a monster of neglect and abuse, but rather as a young woman, unprepared for motherhood and escaping abuse herself, fragile and already profoundly broken in a long line of broken women, and I, her child, as worthy of all the love that she was not able to give. 

It was a radical shift from another viewpoint, one that I had been carrying around for a lifetime, that had lived in me for decades as I struggled to understand the whys or hows of what she had done. This single event changed the scope of my life completely, and so did coming to terms with it.

In the days after finally doing this work, I found a heretofore unfamiliar sense of peace, never before known over the course of my entire life.

But before I get ahead of myself, there’s something you should know about EMDR as a process: before you start it, you have to inventory all your trauma, all the events that marked you to the point that the course of your life was diverted by each one in ways that it otherwise would not have been.

I did that.

My trauma inventory was forty-four lines long.

This particular event was only the first.

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In the last few days, with the passing of a certain monarch, I’ve been thinking about what happens when you don’t reconcile with harm.

Hagiography takes over when we don’t come to terms with our abusers and our abuse, with legacies of harm and their impact on us, with the roles that we have played and that others have played out on us, and reconcile with it all.

Not reconciling with legacies of trauma can lead us to laud a woman who sits on a throne built on the stolen and pillaged and raped and enslaved lands and peoples of an unforgiving and absolutely brutal empire.

It can lead us to believe every story and myth that becoming a princess should be every woman’s fantasy, instead of the reality of a life sentence of complicity and harm and wealth extracted from stolen nations and enslaved people— in other words, a life of abject misery participating in rituals to celebrate the worst harms of humanity, from which only one such woman has even arguably been able to escape.

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In America, we are not good at coming to terms with our histories, and we are getting worse. 

In places like Texas and Florida, governors and legislatures are banning books that tell the truth of who we were and who we have been since our origin. They are trying to eliminate the truth of us, past, present and future, in favor of a rewritten faulty fictionalized version of us that is white, “pure” and christian, and nothing else.

They are seeking to erase history, rather than to look at it, because they think it will give them what they need to control the future of this nation.

Any survivor of trauma will tell you, though, that stuffing it all down and pretending your trauma didn’t happen doesn’t work.

In fact, it leads to the impact of all that trauma bleeding out in other ways, and often all over the people you say you love.

You cannot run from it or ignore it or pretend that it didn’t happen or write over it with fictionalized stories.

You have to look at it, really look at it, investigate it, come to terms with it, or it will eat you alive from the inside out, and take with it everything you thought you wanted and that you said you loved. Not silent ever, if you insist on pretending that you’re fine, that it’s all ok, that nothing bad happened or worse yet that it was all justified, your trauma will exact a price on you for that spun story of pretending, or worse yet, demand that you exact that price from others.

That’s how, actually, you become the perpetrator of the next generation of it.

As Danielle Serad has said, “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it.”

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So how, then, to heal a nation that is so broken that we elected a white supremacist autocrat a bare six years ago, and still haven’t held him accountable for trying to overthrow the whole of US democracy? How to heal a nation where such a person can rise, and seek to rise again?

How to heal a nation that was built on the blood and sweat of enslaved Black people and the theft of land from so many decimated Indigenous tribes, now reflected in land grabs by billionaires to build rockets while housing prices cause ever more people to become unhoused, with ongoing slave labor in prisons and, let’s be real, in Amazon delivery trucks, where we see how little has changed?

How to heal a culture that has taken so much unpaid labor from women at home for centuries to grow itself from nothing that it now expects to encode forced birth and gender identity literally into our laws?

How do we heal so that the rot that is eating us alive can transform into something else, into a heretofore unknown peace, that allows us collectively to become something we have never been?

We need an inventory.

We need a truthful inventory of all our harms and all our trauma.

We need an understanding of complicity and legacy as it lives in us today.

And then, we need to set about the work of repatterning history. Destroying the stories we tell that justify it. Demystifying the why of it, and coming to a real understanding that all this, all of it, was built thanks to greed for obscene wealth and the quest for power over others, and then by folks who thought they could do the same and more but with “religious freedom” attached, and by enslaving others to do the work of building it. 

We need real perspective on the long march of history, the trauma legacy that led us all to this frightening and very real place. 

And then, we must take actions to repair it, to rectify it, to heal it, to really heal it, from the inside out, including through structures of accountability to those harmed, if wanted and by design.

It should be noted that healing doesn’t mean forgiving.

It should be noted that healing doesn’t mean permitting harm to continue.

It is simply the process of coming to terms with what happened, and understanding that we have the power to say “that will never happen again, in any form,” and then doing THAT.

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Healing is a lifelong process, I’ve come to realize. I still have many more boxes on my trauma inventory to tick off, and I continue to walk the path. Some things will not be “fixed” in relationships with people in my life. Some boundaries must remain so firm that they will not be crossed, ever, because to do so would be to invite more of the same harm.

But I will just note that one thing that doing the work on trauma has done for me is that it has redefined what it means to be in healthy relationship to others. It has redefined my worthiness for love, and for a life built on peace as a guiding principle. It has claimed in me the worthiness of all of us to love and be loved, and most importantly, to be given the chance to heal— including, it should be said, those who have perpetrated harm themselves.

I am not finished on the journey of healing what was done to me, but I am walking it every day.

The great abolitionist Mariame Kaba has said that “our work is to lessen suffering however we can, wherever we are.” 

And if we can lessen suffering, if it is in our individual and collective power to do that, why would we not? If we can lead a nation, or a community, or a family, or ourselves, to lives grounded in peace despite immense wells of historic harm, if we can lessen that suffering to any degree, why would we not?

It may take generations of undoing, or it may happen in an instant, with the right commitment and the right methods to open up those places of collective stored memory, to confront those legacies of trauma, to wail and grieve for what we have done and what we have lived through and what has been lost and for so much pain caused and held and felt, and to then recalibrate it all, together, with an awareness and a promise that we never have to, and will never, do that again.

On the wall of my home, there is a painting. It reads: “Expect Miracles.”

A whole nation could turn collective memory from a festering wound into a place of healing, if we were willing to look at the truth of where we came from. 

Would that we would try.