In our journey thus far, a lot has been said about bias, but what about psychological trauma? What about bias and trauma? What about having implicit biases stemming from psychological trauma? It’s probably a very good time to start unpacking some of that.
When we start taking a look at the trauma piece, there is definitely a lot of Western psychological science and expertise pertaining to the subject, and many great individuals have made it the work of their lives to help the human family work through some of the very real impacts of this phenomenon (and we thank you).
For the sake of this discussion, and maybe some moving forward, let’s sum up some of the understandings. Works such as The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk) and My Grandmother’s Hands (Resmaa Menakem), as well as many others, point to the reality that psychological trauma is something that happens to us and/or around us, and it creates a kind of stuckness. This “stuckness impact” affects our psyche, our nervous systems, and our bodies.
The WHO (World Health Organization) goes as far as to state that studies show seven out of ten individuals have experienced trauma. We can have (though not limited to) individual, interpersonal, collective, and structural trauma, and these traumas can impact us across all kinds of areas, including but not limited to physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual well-being.
The 1995 CDC/Kaiser study on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) showed that at least two-thirds of individuals surveyed had experienced at least one traumatic childhood event. Yet let’s also understand that many great works point out that trauma responses are part of some of our natural human survival techniques.
Now, it’s also important to state that just because having a traumatic response to an event (or events) is a human survival technique, it does not excuse the issue or the harm of the event. It simply normalizes and humanizes some of the stuckness that can happen as a result of surviving the thing or things.
I mean, let’s be real about it: there’s a lot of harm that’s been going on for a long, long time, and it continues to ratchet up. And yes, as a result of some of the historic and ongoing violence in our nation and on our planet, it’s probably a safe bet to say that there is a whole lot of trauma around.
And let’s go even further and say that there’s almost certainly a lot of “trauma retention.” And yep, you guessed it—not all of that is resolved.
So what happens when you take a bunch of individual, collective, and generational trauma retention, leave it unresolved, pile some really brutal racial trauma on top of it, and then cut that person—or those persons—loose in a society that favors whiteness, classism, capitalism, overt and covert racism, kind of does dehumanization as one of its side gigs, and also has a basic human function of carrying implicit and unconscious biases?
That looks like some good stuff to chew on until next time.
Stay well.