I maintain that Political and public work is deeply shaped by unseen trauma. In this video, I want to discuss how trauma and dissociation shape the worldview of many people and lead to an unconstructive engagement or non-engagement with the world.
And I want to show how healing from trauma, in turn, leads to being highly political just through our everyday choices and actions.
What we call the political domain today, I perceive most often as a playground for the ego, where things that are being done are more about posturing and keeping up an air of importance instead of the actual and honest relationship work that is needed for sustainable change and growth.
On the other hand, I see a lot of people not engaging in politics at all, not because they do not feel a wish to change things or be heard with their wants and needs, but because they feel like nothing they would do or say would have any impact on what’s going to happen whatsoever.
And so I could say that I can see roughly two groups of people whose political identities are heavily impacted by trauma.
On one side, we have those who are highly emotionally invested in political work. These individuals often view the world as a place in need of urgent change, perceiving everything or at least some things as disasters that must be fixed immediately. They may feel like they are in a life-and-death struggle and they are rising up to meet the challenge and save the day for everyone. The concern, the care and the emotions of these people are real of course. The problem is the lack of connection to self and the inner experience of safety. People like this tend to overcompensate the lost sense of self and safety with an external cause and with the perceived necessity of change and their identity of being the ‚chosen ones‘ to bring it about. They try to make themselves feel safe by changing the world to what it ‚should’ be. This is achieved through overcompensating the underlying sense of powerlessness with a persona of importance and through trying to control the environment.
On the other side, we have those who feel disconnected from the political arena and do not actively feel like they partake in change-making. These are people who believe that nothing they do will ever influence the course of history. They feel like passive observers in a world dominated by more powerful figures. Trauma manifests in this group as a sense of powerlessness and isolation, which makes them feel like they have no control over what’s happening in the world. They might not even consider what they want for the world because they are so entrenched in the belief that they can’t do anything about it anyway.
These two groups—those deeply invested in political change and those who feel disconnected from it—both share a common thread of their experience: which is dissociation stemming from trauma. Whether it drives them to fight for change or withdraw from it entirely, the underlying emotional wounds shape their actions. So let’s explore what trauma is and what it does to us.
What does it feel like when we’ve experienced trauma? And why does it impact us in this way?
Trauma and especially the dissociation that often comes with it have a huge impact on our subjective perception of ourselves and the world. The way we experience things. When we get overwhelmed by a situation and our nervous system can’t deal with the intensity, we lose touch with ourselves. Dissociation means that we are moving away from registering ourselves, sensing ourselves because, through a certain experience, there is too much pain there to be handled by us. Feeling ourselves would mean feeling the pain. So Dissociation is a protection mechanism, that can help us to continue living under severe stress and in unhealthy environments. Most often this happens in our childhood when developmental needs are not met and we have to dissociate away from them to keep on growing.
It’s a genius mechanism of our nervous system to be able to function through things that are breaking us apart inside. But if we cannot integrate and heal from these internal wounds and come out of the dissociation again, as soon as the environment allows it, and bring our system back into the experience of safety and wholeness, we are stuck in a place that is characterized by these qualities:
- A sense of powerlessness
- A feeling of isolation or separation from others and life
- Giving away our power to external authorities
- Not being in touch with our boundaries
The powerlessness comes from the experience of being overwhelmed by something external to us. It tells our system that there are things out there that can make us freeze and lock up. Things that are so intense and scary for us that we are completely unable to do anything about it. We are at the mercy of them. So again, this most often happens in our childhood, when we are dependent on our parents on them to look out for us and give us nurturance, care and affection. If we lose the affection of our parents, this is an existential threat for us at that time. And so because our parents may withdraw their love and affection, be it because of something we did or just because they’re having a rough time, we subconsciously learn, that other people have it in their power to decide over our survival. If we experience something like this in our childhood, and we do not process it as adults, we remain in the sense of powerlessness and keep on projecting this fear onto other people and the world at large, even though now we can look after ourselves and we are no longer in the danger to socially die, because others treat us poorly.
The Sense of Isolation comes from the fact that in dissociation we split off a part of our awareness into a kind of limbo state. So: If our needs aren’t being met, at one point that becomes so painful, that we split off the awareness of that need. We no longer feel that need being there and also don’t have to feel the pain of that need not being met. Not feeling seems better than feeling when we need to dissociate. But because life is experienced most deeply through our felt connection to it, in dissociation we also lose some aspect or most aspects of our connection to life and to our own life force – how life moves in us. We suddenly feel like life is external to us like we’re not really part of it. As somehow we’re alive, but also not really. Just spectators. As if life happens without us and doesn’t move us. So there might be a situation where other people feel moved and they’re tearing up or are just really touched, and to us, just nothing happens. And we can also feel like we are not moving life, co-creating experience through our attitude and actions. It’s just happening to us.
We give away our power to external authorities because in dissociation we are not connected to our own inner knowing. So naturally we would have our own inner compass. We have our own spontaneous reactions and instincts. And we would normally follow them to guide us through life. But in dissociation, we are disconnected from them and are lost without our own guidance. In order not to feel lost we start to rely on external authority to look out for us and tell us what is best for us. Of course, only we can know what is really best for us, and so in this situation, when we give power away to others, or to culture, to traditions, or ideas and concepts etc. this often leads to the abuse of power. Trauma is behind our inability to choose for ourselves or have our own opinions. Because we are not in connection with what we feel inside
We are not in touch with our boundaries, because in trauma, our boundaries have been completely violated. So for example, if I have a need as a child and this need isn’t being met, in the beginning, I will stand up for my need being met. I will cry or protest or throw a tantrum or whatever. That’s my boundary in action. But at one point I will resign and give up if the need is not being met over too long a time. So I dissociate away from the need, from the pain of not getting it met, and also from the boundary around that need, the communication of what I want and need. We have moved away from the pain of this violation and with being numb to the pain comes being numb to our own boundaries. We start to tolerate things because we don’t register our boundaries anymore. This leads to situations where we are very vulnerable to abuse because we can be in situations where our boundaries are crossed or experience infringement on our boundaries, without even realizing that it is happening.
When we’re active in the world, when we act externally but ignore our inner world and what’s happening there with trauma and dissociation, we often recreate the same powerlessness and isolation no matter what we do. In our efforts to create change -be it on a personal or political level-, we can end up mirroring our internal struggles. And we are finding ourselves in a Fight against something, instead of from the experience of being a part of the whole, co-creating and inspiring the change that we want to see.
The thing is, that most people are stuck in trauma and dissociation, but don’t even realize it, because it’s their normality. They don’t start to question their experience, because they can’t remember any other experience than this and just assume that this is everybody’s reality.
As I already started pointing out earlier, this is actually a huge factor in what is happening globally. A lot of people are giving their power away to so-called political leaders, projecting their hope for positive change onto this single individual or a certain party, projecting power on others, while feeling powerless within. And others are taking the power, covering their own sense of powerlessness and impotence with a savior identity and compensating their lack of existential safety with the story of being the ones that are creating the new, better world of tomorrow.
This dynamic is what is behind all tyranny forming, and behind all infringement on personal liberty, freedom of speech, and personal responsibility.
It’s just some people taking the responsibility of other people not taking it, and abusing it for their own personal ends.
Nobody can take the responsibility that is yours and do a good job at that. It’s not that we have the wrong people in power. It’s that we have to take back the power and responsibility over our own lives and not let anyone else decide for us.
This is mainly done through growing and healing out of our traumas and dissociation.
So by pointing out these qualities we find in someone who is in trauma and dissociation, I hope to give some reference points to look at your own experience or have it as a lens to look at what’s happening with others or on the world stage.
We can actually get out of trauma and dissociation and experience safety, connectedness and healthy responsibility for ourselves again.
Not by focusing on changing the external world or by withdrawing from it, but by looking at our internal experience and coming back into healthy control of our immediate experience.
So what can happen for us when we heal from our trauma?
As we heal from trauma – through therapy, coaching, contemplation and self-compassion – we can start to move out of dissociation and start to process the emotional pain, the unmet needs and so on.
By doing this we can reclaim our sense of integrity and safety. We get back in touch with our inner knowing of who we are, what we want and what we need.
The feeling of powerlessness diminishes. Even just by being in connection with what we want, we feel more empowered, because now we know. Compared to not knowing and just being afloat in life and completely lost.
We start to fill the space that we inhabit with our own meaning-making and start to choose based on everything we know and especially what we feel inside to be the right thing for us in that moment. We start to lead our lives not from what other people or tradition tells us to do, but from spontaneously sensing what moves our inner life force, by in the moment listening to how life wants to be expressed through us. So this is an in-the-moment spontaneous, emerging process that we can start to take part in again, as soon as we are in connection with our inner world, our feelings, our inner knowing, our boundaries, with what is happening inside of us on a felt level.
That happens because we no longer experience ourselves as separate from life when we are able to move out of dissociation more and more. When we get into contact with our unprocessed emotions, and we are able to integrate them as time goes on, more and more we will realize on an experiential level, that we are live, that we are just another expression of life and that we are part of everything.
We can also start to realize that there is not really a power center. We don’t need to be in a certain position of power to have an impact on society. The more we heal from trauma and the more we start to sense this interconnectedness, which is happening experientially in our system in our bodies, the more we realize that actually everything we do is somehow co-creating the bigger whole. Society’s stories and our culture and traditions are all just the conglomerate dreams and ideas of everybody who’s part of it. So we are kind of co-creating this collective experience all the time. The way we act, express ourselves, and think and dream about society, will be mirrored in our everyday lives and impact the people around us. Although we can often not tangibly experience this, our actions have a kind of ripple effect, filtering through our immediate surroundings into everything.
So imagine you’re talking to someone and expressing a differing opinion to them. Especially when you express this opinion calmly and thoughtfully, including the feelings of the other person and it just being an invitation to reflect on this, the other person is very likely to think about it and will be impacted by you.
When we heal from our trauma and no longer come from fear, terror, anger, shoulds and oughts and musts, but actually from the sense of okness, openness, playfulness, peace, compassion etc. -all qualities that naturally emerge the more we come out of dissociation and trauma and work through the unresolved emotional pain from the past – that has an incredible impact on others. They might not even realize what is happening to them, but you coming and sharing yourself from this place is so fresh and such a welcome change to what most of the other stuff out there is, that people will be very impacted by you, be it only subconsciously.
But this has this kind of ripple effect, as I said before. It will trigger things in others and change perspectives for them, which will lead them to think or act differently, which will again impact their environment. This filters from you into everything that is going in. You are having your best possible impact on the world.
We start to lead completely different lives outside of the trauma-reality and go about differently in our self-care, our relationships, our work, our spirituality and our engagement with the world at large.
When we start to act from the sense of connectedness and integrity, and authenticity and clarity – all qualities that start to emerge by healing our trauma and dissociation – we are actually impacting the whole of society towards more coherence, towards more embodiment of self, towards more actual safety – not negative control.
And it doesn’t even matter so much then if we are ‚politically active‘ or not.
If you feel genuinely called for political work, out of your authenticity connected to feeling safe and secure within you, and just because you want to do this and it makes you feel alive and channels your passions in e good way, perfect!
And if you feel from your authenticity that you rather invest your energy and life force into something else and keep on expressing your boundaries, your thoughts and opinions unfiltered in whatever situation you find yourself in, also perfect!
When we are starting to embody our Selves, because we move out of dissociation and being split off from our Selves, from our felt sense of Self, we automatically start to take responsibility for ourselves. Even already the step to want to look at our dissociation, realizing for example oh I’m giving my power away, or Actually i feel like none of my actions do anything, or overcompensating and feeling like you have to save the world. Even when you do this that’s already taking responsibility for ourselves.
When we take responsibility for ourselves and start to express what we feel inside, become more authentic and bring in our perspective, connected to our inner knowing, even if that is vulnerable and we might struggle to do it:
Everything we do becomes highly political and we start to have a huge impact on everything that is going on.
That’s because we are now again connected to the spontaneous and emergent flow of life force and we are making in-the-moment decisions, creating new experiences and opportunities.
That’s in stark contrast to what we do when we are still stuck in dissociation. When we are still in dissociation we can’t be innovative, we aren’t in contact with our creativity and ability to innovate. We aren’t surfing the cusp of evolution so to speak 😉 And so all we can do is just recycle our own powerlessness and lack of healthy control and we keep up the culture as it already is – with the problems of power abuse.
Does change come from doing the same things over and over in different styles?
Or does it come from spontaneous actions out of the moment that are unique to us, creative and fresh, because we are deciding NOW to take responsibility for the best version of ourselves and society that we can dream of?
The point I want to make with this video is that healing from trauma and dissociation brings us to this place where we can start to make new decisions and create new healthy pathways for ourselves, taking back control over our lives.
And when you do it for yourself you are somehow simultaneously to it for everybody else too