Ireland, we need to talk about trauma (Or, Why Human Beings Are Not Like Tarantulas).

 

If you’ve been living in Ireland this month, and not under a rock, you will have been aware of the impact of the Mother and Baby Home Bill.  The history of the complex path to legislature of this Bill is outlined in some data here by Ailbhe Coneely. Like most Irish citizens, I don’t have the legal or political expertise to make sense of, let alone offer useful commentary, on most of it.

Instead, what I want to talk about today is how we currently talk about trauma.

I want to talk about what, from my perspective, we are still, in 2020, getting wrong when it comes to being “trauma-informed” in Ireland.

Trauma lives in the body

Trauma has many different definitions, but broadly speaking, it refers to human experiences of encountering significant adversity that has been overwhelmingly physically or emotionally shocking. This can include living through deeply distressing or disturbing experiences such as neglect, physical and sexual abuse and experiencing or witnessing violence, among many others.

Today, I’d like to consider trauma through the lens of a very different news story.

For a moment, imagine what you would do today, if, like a certain recent unsuspecting Donegal shopper, you were unpacking your shopping and noticed a stowaway tarantula in a box of bananas.

I'll spare you a photo, but take a few seconds to really feel the shudder of it – consider what it would feel like in your body, what thoughts you might have, what immediate actions you might take.  

Perhaps you might scream. You might run away. I’m pretty sure I’d throw the bananas across the room. It’s likely you’d feel pretty rattled.

I’m going to go ahead and guess you would also pretty quickly recognise the limits of your own experience and training to deal with this new and unpredictable situation – perhaps calling in an expert to support you.

And hopefully, just like for the Donegal shopper, a qualified, experienced expert like ISPCA care assistant Leela Voss would be  quickly on hand to help you identify that the hideous creature in your weekly shop was in fact, not the poisonous monster of your imagination, but a baby, tired after an exhausting journey, in need of hydration and nourishment , a name and a new home.

Trauma is not a tarantula – or is it?

While trauma is not a tarantula, it’s probably fair to say that many people fear it, don’t know what to do with it and respond to it with fear and disgust.

This makes a certain sense.  Without the right information, it is understandable that people will  focus on the fears that when mishandled, trauma can have severe and longlasting consequences.

It's also true that in encountering trauma, identifying it, seeking support, ensuring basic needs are met,  supporting identity and ensuring access to a safe and secure home are pretty wise.

However, we must be mindful to remember that human beings are not tarantulas, and have more complex, diverse and individual needs around identity, belonging and security than furry little Parker the red-rumped tarantula.

As such, it is critically important we take care about the stories we tell about trauma and what it means to survive it. This means making an important distinction between understandable feelings of fear and disgust about the realities of abuse, neglect and violence in the world, on the one hand, and  unwarranted, damaging fear of people telling their stories, or a fear of hearing those stories being told, on the other.

You see, though we don’t like to admit it, trauma, no matter how horrific, sustained or enduring, is a common human experience. It isn’t something that’s rare, exotic or non-native, and experiencing it doesn’t make a person poisonous, unpredictable or dangerous. 

Experiencing trauma also doesn’t make a person an eternal baby, more like a wild creature than a human:  ever fragile and vulnerable, incapable of loving relationships and in need of handling only by experts in specialist settings behind closed doors (no matter how helpful, useful or necessary expert help may prove to be for particular survivors).

The sad reality is, however, most survivors report  at least some experiences of being othered or treated as "less than" or "different from" others for sharing their very human stories.

How are we still getting this wrong in 2020?

Hang on, you might say – you’re overblowing all this, no one talks or thinks about survivors  like this. Except they do, at very high levels, and it informs and shapes our public understanding of important issues of human rights in our society and state.

We have seen several commentators in recent weeks very quickly jumping on this to suit their own agenda, suggesting any talk about trauma in the broader culture was likely to be “retraumatising” for survivors. The concept of “retraumatisation”  can be particularly pernicious in how it can be recruited to gloss over current abuses of human rights.

I don't think this is intentional on the part of those who promote this story, but I think the time has come to think critically about the impacts of blanket narratives about traumatic experiencing.

Let's take an example. Professor Alan Carr of UCD Psychology was an expert contributor to the Ryan Commission on the psychological experiences of survivors of institutional abuse. Very recently, he presented at the launch of  the 2020 “Facing the Future Together” report, and had this to say:

“Many of the ways we’ve set up services for survivors is not taking account of the fact that the capacity to trust people in authority, that have resources that they need, the capacity to form trusting relationships with them was seriously irreparably damaged early in their lives. 

So if I am a survivor & I come & ask for a service from a public servant, & the public servant asks me to prove I am worthy of that, that automatically awakens in me all of feelings I experienced as a young person when I said, "this isn't one bit fair, I'm being humiliated and beaten or raped, and no one will believe me, I re-experience all of that if I come to a public service and I'm asked to justify am I worthy of receiving that service.

I think it's vital that people in public services are trained in understanding what it's like to be traumatised. Our services must be trauma-informed.  They really have to be. To be a survivor is to live in a world where no one is trustworthy unless services open their door and say we believe you from the word go, you don’t have to justify what you’re asking for because we know we really let you down, I think that’s the perspective services have to come from.” 

As an established international expert on the psychology of trauma who has carried out extensive and thorough research on the long-term consequences of institutional abuse on survivors in the Irish context, author of a key curriculum for Clinical Psychology in Ireland and Head of Clinical Psychology in University College Dublin, Professor Carr is clearly an expert. His words, as such, carry immense weight in how they shape our public services for survivors. I truly believe that he believes these words based on his very comprehensive research on the effects of institional abuse on survivors, and that the intention behind them is to alleviate suffering and ensure survivors encounter services meet providers who are well trained, sensitive and respectful.  And, to stretch the spider metaphor a bit more, with great power comes great responsibility.

These words, it must be said, are being uttered in the context of repeated, consistent and persistent failures of our government, public services and society as a whole to keep promises it has made to survivors regarding redress. Are survivors challenges with forming trusting relationships indicative of internal brokenness, in this context? Is due weight given to the current, live, and living experience of being othered, or not having basic needs met? 

From my perspective, talking about survivor experience without foregrounding contextual accountability in the here and now points to challenges we face when talking about being “trauma-informed” in Ireland, and suggests to me we’re still getting the language of trauma wrong.

To begin with, I might suggest that, in all contexts and all settings, we should expect as a basic minimum that service providers will be responsive and respectful to all, irregardless of their history.  A service provider should require neither special training nor explicit reminders to ensure that they are sensitive and respectful in all their dealings with all those whom they are paid to serve.

This is even more crucial in the context of a shared cultural and social history in which from the beginning of the state,  institutions have been recruited to protect, by any means necessary, a “perfect image” of a “pure” Ireland so often at odds with actual practices behind closed doors. 

We must not forget this. We must take incredible care to be clear, transparent and accountable in how we communicate what expressing human need means about the humanity of those expressing a particular need, and understand the limitations of  decontextualised, research-based "understanding" of another person's lived experience. 

Secondly, we need to consider the language of hierarchy implicit in this narrative, that to "engage with services" it is a requirement that an individual has the "capacity" to form a trusting relationship, as defined by structured interviews in the context of psychological research on individuals.

Services in modern Ireland are no longer provided for by Churches, but paid for by taxpayers, citizens of the state. When we can work, we pay taxes to provide for people in need knowing that at any point, a change in circumstances could mean that any of us need help and support to rebuild our lives. This is a basic premise of our social contract.

In this context, no one should be in a position to be begging for essential services, and yet that’s not where we are at. Every person in need in our society currently faces an uphill battle in accessing services.  Dr Mark Murphy has written eloquently on  the realities of our mental health services this week as an example.  Certainly in the context of such resource constraint,  if I am in need, my capacity to access services should not rest on a provider’s judgement of my capacity to “form a trusting relationship” based on the flimsiest of information about my history and their appraisal of what this means about me. To suggest otherwise dances dangerously with stigma and perpetuating institutional abuses.

Furthermore, if I am at the other side of the table, as a provider of services, it is my responsibility to do everything I can to establish real, sustained committed trust with the people I serve, not to expect those going through the worst of their worst of times to dance a veritable jig or doff the cap to gain or sustain my attention.  I am sure Professor Carr might argue that this is not what he is pointing to, but it is a frame I think we need to be willing to challenge, and not accept uncritically. From my perspective, “being trauma informed” should not involve pinning a story of brokenness on someone because of what happened to them when they were children without due regard for all variables impacting their ability to access services in the here and now.

If we are serious about upholding principles of dignity and respect, we simply can’t, in 2020,  buy into a story that the reason professional relationships with survivors sometimes fail in an underfunded public service is because of  the immutable inability of victims to trust:

• It’s stigmatising and victim blaming.
• It stops all of us in Irish society looking seriously at our own behaviour and taking accountability when we mess up
•  It stops us looking seriously at systemic issues such as defunding and mismanagement of public services
•  It gives abusive or incompetent practitioners a free pass not only when they cause harm, but gives license to systems to protect unskilled practitioners from being held to account for harmful behaviour
• It treats a person like they are a thing or an object (it is abusive).

You could even say this story involves  treating a person as if they were a tarantula: exotic, unpredictable,  too “hot to handle” and in need of being whisked away by an expert handler before anyone gets poisoned by getting too close to it.

Things are changing.

In our recent history,  we have seen many moves towards more a progressive, inclusive and compassionate society. Shared stories have been at the heart of  this. We owe so much to the willingness of women and men to tell their stories without shame or compromise and to remind us that are at our strongest when we listen to eachother, and sit with the stories we carry.

To return to the words of Professor Alan Carr, 

“to move past the psychological distress and shame caused by institutional abuse and the secrecy surrounding it, survivors need accounts of their abuse to be read, understood and validated by Irish society.”

I would contend if we are ever to truly do this effectively, we need to remember there is no imaginary, pure Irish society that is somehow different from or separate from these stories:  this is who we are. There is no “us”, no psychologically-minded elite who can, with the right training, become “trauma-informed” to engage with “them” when it comes to provision of basic public services.  There is only us, and we are all responsible for facing the future together.   

Institutional trauma is our national and collective faultline. We all know those intimately affected, whether or not they have ever told us their stories. I am grateful to my family for telling theirs.  For me, I will always remember two things. The story of my grandmother, suffering extreme domestic abuse, closing the door on the men from the NSPCC who came to see if they could “help” her, knowing from work she was doing in the convent what that would really mean. I also remember listening, over many years, to my father’s attempts to make sense of anguished, tortured flashbacks to clerical sexual abuse : pain that added fuel to a lifetime battle with addiction until his death.

These kinds of stories are held with so much shame by so many people in Ireland, still, and yet if we are to be truthful about who we are, these are entirely ordinary, common-as-muck stories - as common as the potato, the garden mouse, soda bread and tea. The only shame is in how we long we have hidden it from eachother, denying eachother the human comfort of collective healing and grieving for the darknesses of our past. 

In recent weeks, there have been encouraging signs that as a society, we are no longer content with tolerating narratives that set survivor experience as distinct from or apart from our society, "others" we must learn how to deal with, or design services for that entail "us" (whoever that is) "understanding" "their" experience based on pretty much everything but listening to real live human beings actually telling their experience in a manner that suits themselves. The romantic in me hopes there are hints of a dawning remembering of who we are: Irish people, rightfully respectful and despairing and outraged that our fellow Irish citizens have had fundamental and basic human rights to have their identify respected and to be heard, listened to,  understood and responded to denied for far too long. 

No,  Ireland, we are not tarantulas. We and our ancestors are not nor were we ever intruders or outsiders.  We are not now, nor were we ever,  wild, predictable or fearful because of what we have endured, and our desire to tell our stories when we wished to, how we wished to and to whom we wished to was never inappropriate or maladaptive because some wished to look away and bury their heads in the sand. 

Our webs were broken, only to be spun again, and our human capacity to begin again is the only trauma-informed story worth spinning. 

 

Links

You can listen to Professor Alan Carr talk about his extensive expertise and research in trauma in the Irish context here alongside testimony from survivor groups sharing feelings of abandonment by the Irish state here