In 2010, at the age of 28, I finally went to therapy and ended up with a diagnosis of C-PTSD.
Shortly after, I tried explaining my diagnosis to a family member, and she got very upset. Someone else in our family had PTSD, but he was a Vietnam veteran—and I had never been to war. How dare I claim to have anything in common with him?
That person, not coincidentally, was one of the people most responsible for traumatizing me. You see: nothing they had done to me was abusive or harmful, according to their own view of the world. For my diagnosis to be valid, they would have to re-evaluate almost everything they thought they understood about life and human relationships.
We all know abuse is bad. What qualifies as abuse, and who has the right to define it—that’s the real battle for meaning.
At this moment, the American government is in the hands of people who are saying all the quiet parts of hierarchal thinking out loud. They explicitly claim the right to hurt whoever they think they can get away with hurting. This is a practice run. They want to hurt and punish everyone who disagrees with them or criticizes them. The day is shortly coming when they’ll begin to try.
We base our resistance on the deep understanding that we are all the same. My suffering is bound up with other people’s suffering. Their liberation is my liberation. I wasn’t born knowing that. I was propagandized and brainwashed my whole life by a culture that relies on hurting some people for the luxury and ease of others. Whatever love and empathy there was in my heart got routed away from the people who needed it most. I wasn’t taught to hate them, at least not by that name. I was taught to ignore them, or to see them as deserving their own pain.
But then I began to explore my own trauma.
Then, I became homeless.
Then I experienced the crushing totalitarianism of engineered poverty.
I saw my own pain. I asked questions about it. I searched for answers. I saw the pattern in my life, and I saw it in the lives of my abusers (individuals, entire communities). I finally understood that you can’t hurt people for their own good. There is no such thing.
(Esme Weatherwax is the only ethicist you should trust.)
Since November 2024, I've been struggling not to lose myself to nonspecific free-floating terror. (C-PTSD-induced anxiety, in other words.) The people who run the United States right now raised me. I was educated to be an evangelical culture warrior, a trad wife, a Christian apologist. I went to Christian schools in Raleigh where girls couldn't wear pants and were served less food than the boys. I escaped that world in stages during my teens. Now, somehow, these people are again in positions of authority over me. My rage and fear occasionally brush the borders of hysteria.
But because I know what my trauma means, I know what I have to do: pit every skill, every talent, and all the strength I possess against a future where all of our kids are forced to grow up like I did.
Last fall, I was given an opportunity to start a community trauma writing workshop in my Baltimore neighborhood. Work took me back to North Carolina when the workshop had only been underway for a few weeks.
I am looking for a space to teach these materials in or around my current location. But in the mean time, my outlines and notes are just hanging out in my drive, of use to no one. I think, while I’m waiting for a chance to go public, this is the best place to put them.
We live in a new age of trauma literacy. I think it's a significant causal factor in recent social unraveling. Trauma literacy inspires people to end their marriages, go no-contact with family members, walk out of jobs, attend protests. People who change their whole lives after confronting their trauma take back their power, asserting ownership over their bodies, their time, their life stories.
This leaves the people they took the power back from in a state of internal chaos. When the script you relied on gets flipped, the only way to regain equilibrium is to grow and change. Rarely do the people who lose control over their victims receive any guidance in how to grow. Flailing, they grasp for stability by trying to undo the changes that dethroned them. When they can’t make you change your mind, they turn to force and violence.
I hope that future generations will achieve a degree of trauma literacy that encompasses ways to reconcile with each other without retribution and punishment. But our collective self-knowledge is still in its infancy.
Right now, terrifying power resides in the hands of people who feel that they have the right to seize power by any means necessary, and to do whatever it takes to keep that power. Pitted against them are those of us who know we have to be free, or nothing else in our life will have meaning.
In the middle are the people still clinging to their security and their dissociation, hoping the rest of us settle down so they can get back to scrolling.
But I am not capable of dissociation at this time. Calm means something different to me nowadays.
Trauma that heals on the deepest levels becomes a source of strength and clarity. A furnace burns in your chest. Righteous anger. A need for justice. A need to protect others. You begin to feel an inner authority that can't be gaslit or confused.
In the parlance of support groups, we call this "the survivor mission". You're reading mine right now.
(Joan says, you don’t have to hate your enemies to kick their little butts.)
Over the next few weeks, I am going to convert my notes and outlines for my community trauma writing course into blog posts. These will be organized on Substack under the tag "Voice Lessons". (Because we're finding our voices. It is a punne, or play on words.)
Writing is capable of knitting our brains back together, if we come to it with that intention. That's a magic you can count on.
Will writing about your trauma stop the Nazis in their tracks? Probably not. But it helped me figure out the difference between internalized abuse and my own truth. Assurance and courage follow that kind of certainty.
The first four weeks of the Voice Lessons curriculum will run as follows:
One: Why is this so hard? (identify your personal obstacles)
Two: Equipment maintenance (how to safely engage trauma writing)
Three: The right to write (claiming ownership of your trauma narrative)
Four: Types of trauma writing (clarify your personal goals)
Next week I’ll start posting the material from part one. Once we’ve run through everything from the “Trauma 101” section, there’s a literature review, and some insider analysis of trauma writing I’ve published in the past.
Feel free to share this post as a resource with anyone you think might be interested in all this trauma writing talk. Send me your questions, and get ready: we’re dismantling the kyriarchy in ourselves before we dismantle it in the world. Might want to eat some protein.