Unity Beyond Trauma?

In this essay I will consider how to manage aspects of our present sociocultural and political crises from the perspective of factors that do not derive solely from Donald Trump’s personality or venality. For a leader’s malignancy to take root in a citizenry, there must be a corresponding dysfunction in the body politic, including but not limited to the ways groups and communities function in the wake of mass trauma.

Horror now joins terror as part of our national mood. How, in the seemingly stable U.S., could a murderous insurrection have been organized to erupt in the streets and disrupt democratic functioning in the hallowed halls of our Capitol? Not us, many

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exclaimed; not here, averred others; not now, noticed many who felt they were watching a re-run of traumatic aspects of the Revolution, the Civil War, post-Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq wars, the Civil Rights movement, and 9/11 all at once. As Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design, the exhibition designers of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, I was perhaps more aware than many of the ways that traumatic memories and their accompanying anxieties—condensed as if in a dream—repeat so that they can be understood and mastered: invasion, collapse, fright, anger, rescue, and the new but never-ending presence of absence. Can we manage to understand enough of our present circumstances to rebuild at all, let alone make it better than before?

Nations traumatized by mass catastrophe, like traumatized individuals, suffer grievous loss of the ability to comprehend the enormity of what and who was lost. This results, in part, from binary thinking in both their leaders and citizens. After a mass traumatic event like war or foreign incursion, the world looks either good or bad, black or white, but never both at once because the ability to hold mixed feelings is one of the capacities that is knocked out by traumatic levels of terror. When thinking is reduced to polarities and losses cannot be mourned, a nation, like an individual, is vulnerable to repeating compulsively what is not remembered and represented symbolically.

Post-traumatic fracturing into good-bad polarized thinking also influences how groups function. Specifically, traumatized helplessness induces group incohesion, leaving groups without the capacity to function harmoniously, solve problems, or relate to leaders in a way that results in the completion of tasks or the protection and empowerment of members. In incohesive groups, members either form into large masses (such as large political rallies in which the crowd can merge with a charismatic leader) or aggregates (like groups of emotionally disconnected individuals walking on city streets or like lone-wolf terrorists united only tangentially). The give-and-take even among members of high functioning groups also diminishes, so solutions are poorly conceived. We have been in such a fragmented, dysfunctional state since at least 9/11 when the aftermath of the attacks magnified already existing political divisions.

Sociology and psychohistory teach that the alienation impelled by normless instability after WWI produced the counteracting pull of mass fascistic gatherings in Hitler’s Germany. A similar

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response to fear and vulnerability can be detected in the U.S. response to COVID-19, which has in some ways replicated such disconnection by producing in us a similar inability to communicate effectively. We have all seen those who succumbed to manic partying, or the many isolated individuals who have had little choice but to narrowly relate to one another via little cyberspace-mediated boxes, or those who refuse to be thus constrained. In a role like that of the U.S. Senate jury for the impeachment trial, we are constituted as both victims and witnesses. Until we can recognize and process our fear and grief—something more naturally done when people can safely engage with one another in the routines and rituals of community life—we are at risk of remaining divided as well as dangerously receptive to demagogic leaders who stimulate false hope, playoff racist stereotypes to increase a sense of belonging in their followers, quash dissent, and incite violence to exaggerate citizens’ fears.

Communal mourning activities, when they are valued and allowed to occur, can restore social links that have ruptured in trauma’s wake. Our collective difficulty with mourning has a long history and is rooted in historical traumas we have not been able to face. I date our current political/social gridlock to trauma-driven incohesive group processes that arose to manage fear, grief, and anger after 9/11 when concerned mutuality was trumped by a reactive rush to war and imagined triumph. National traumas, like individual traumatic events, can restimulate behaviors and beliefs more appropriate to older traumas, like the racialized polarization that led to the Civil War. If we can find our way to memorializing our many dead through marches, vigils, TV cameos, and eventually funerals and memorials, we may also reclaim our ability to care for one another across our social divides.

“Who cares for us?” is a sentiment voiced by both communities and often hurled at each other. Both Blacks and Whites have suffered unnecessary deaths—some sudden and shocking like those from COVID-19, some unfolding over such extended periods that we barely notice them. In both circumstances, the systemic neglect or retaliatory abuse by those with more privilege or authority—police, policymakers, politicians, and the moneyed interests behind them—leave anguished survivors viewing their loved ones’ deaths as not just deliberate but unforgivable. Since creating racialized divisions is exactly how challenged authoritarians attempt to stay in power, we must cease blaming one another and focus instead on the

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system that produces a government that eschews protecting its citizens. One way to do this is to acknowledge our mutual
vulnerability through mourning together. Led by the courageous Black Lives Matter movement, we have continued to protest the losses of so many Black lives to police brutality, but we have barely begun to mourn the truly unthinkable number (nearly 500,000 as of writing) of mostly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), essential workers, and elderly people who have died of COVID-19, or the nearly uncountable number of others who have suffered death at the hands of oppressors since this country’s founding. But perhaps surprisingly, I believe we must also engage in national mourning for the hundreds of thousands of deaths (mostly young, White, male, and thought to be inessential workers) from the opiate epidemic—the public health emergency we were aware of before COVID-19
arrived on our shores.

Why? This must be done to address the binary thinking that characterizes our traumatized politics, not because of any intent to attribute moral equivalence. White supremacist beliefs, violence, and murder are reprehensible and represent the de-symbolization of our cultural discourse. But if we are to function more cohesively, we must mourn the massive losses on both sides of the racialized political divide.

As of February 2021, statistics show that opiate-induced deaths constitute a nearly equal number to those resulting from COVID-19. The recent settlement of the Purdue Pharma case reminds us that just because beliefs appear delusional or greatly distorted, doesn’t mean they do not emerge from a grain of truth.
During the opiate epidemic, innocent people did suffer at the hands of malignant capitalist decision-makers with little stake in the communities of those who died.

Has the country witnessed the pain of either group in ways that help the bereaved feel contained? Has the government addressed their losses in meaningful ways? No, because they are felt to be unbearable.

During Thinc’s memorial museum team meetings, I often observed the designers unconsciously enact various aspects of the traumatic memories of 9/11, which had been dissociated because the emotions stimulated were intolerable. When understood, the unprocessed moments of unbearable affect could be rendered by us

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into words and inserted into the verbal curatorial narrative that would ultimately organize and choreograph the sequence of exhibits. One affective phenomenon that was never translated for inclusion in the museum was the collapse in faith in our institutions expressed by some who felt unprotected by our government, which had responded too little, too late to warnings of attacks. It was one of many storylines that the museum design team recollected, “translated,” and proposed to the curators, who rejected this storyline as inappropriate to an overarching narrative suitable for a national memorial. Although we argued for the inclusion of multiple, even contradictory narratives, which were often accepted, in this instance, the story of some portion of the citizenry feeling betrayed by the government was not narrativized.

It is axiomatic to psychologists that trauma, if not remembered, is re-enacted. So it is uncanny, but not coincidental, that managing our current moment of disaster requires acknowledging that our government’s neglect resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many citizens. So many that a majority of citizens rose up to elect a competent and less polarizing manager as President. Will contestation of that narrative finally reduce our democracy to rubble or can we unite?

The Trump-inspired insurrectionists exhibited what psychologists call “identification with the aggressor,” a common defense in traumatized people who cannot bear their powerlessness to stop a terrifying situation in which they are victimized. The domestic terrorists used the same tactics as the foreign terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, an invasion of a building that is iconic of our country’s values. The attacks of 9/11 produced five kinds of collapse: the physical collapse of the buildings; the collapse of iconic symbols of our financial power; temporal collapse, as evidenced by the confusion of the meanings of current circumstances with those of the past; narrative collapse, as shown by our subsequent inability to tell a common story; and intersubjective collapse, as seen in the difficulty we have in trusting others with different viewpoints than our own lest we lose our own valued selfhood. This time the attack on our country was from within, suggesting that we have moved beyond temporal rupture and polarized congressional gridlock into a near-total inability to communicate based on consensual truth.

What can unite us in these dire circumstances? Trump and his murderous seditionists must, of course, be held accountable and we should move toward a reparative truth and reconciliation pro-

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cess. But, given the problem of narrativizing emotions, establishing mutuality will likely be exceedingly challenging. So don’t start with dialogue. Start with grieving. Dead bodies demand that we count them, name them, and carry their weight. They demand we move in processions, singing and weeping. They demand monuments around which we can gather and share stories. Most of all, they demand that we witness one another’s pain and recognize it as our own. It is through feeling the other’s suffering as one’s own that we may truly begin to heal.

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