Society has the tools to support traumatised people, we just don’t use them
I’m the kind of happy-go-lucky person who spends their free time thinking about the impact of psychological trauma. And there’s a saying that’s been going around my head when I do: “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”. Traumatic events are very hard things to process but not impossible, so why do so many people struggle? It’s because our society is structured in a way that doesn’t support people to recover from trauma. Most of the damage happens in the aftermath, in the way our culture handles people who’ve had traumatic experiences.
We can do better though, for proof look at how we handle death and grief: families come together, we have ceremonies and rituals to process our feelings, the 5 stages of grief are well known and grieving people are given licence to behave in ways outside social norms.
Imagine for a second what bereavement would be like if it was handled in the same way as abuse or trauma. Imagine someone you love dies, you think about telling someone but you know a lot of people will think you’re lying or question you to see if you were in any way responsible for the death. Despite it being someone else who died, you feel an intense shame for becoming bereaved. You decide to say nothing and just keep going to work or school.
Your friends and family don’t know about your loss, so none of them check in with you, they don’t come round and cook for you, you can’t ring them up just to say how much pain you’re in. You get no support.
As far as you’re aware no one you know has ever experienced the death of someone close to them, at least, no one ever talks about it. Having no one to talk to, you don’t know what to expect or what a normal reaction to death looks like. There is no funeral. You don’t notice its absence though, because the idea that a ceremony could help you process your feelings about death is almost completely unheard of.
Sometimes you can’t keep your grief in and you break down in tears, without any context people suggest there’s a problem with your body — maybe you have a tear duct disorder? You agree to see a Doctor but you’re too ashamed of being bereaved to tell them about it, so you just talk about the crying. You get a few appointments to learn techniques to stop crying and some medication that reduces the number of tears you can produce.
You have no outlet to express the pain and overwhelming sadness so it comes out in other ways — you get angry, you cut yourself, you drink too much. You know there are names for people like you, you are crazy, mental, an addict, a junkie. You are now a stigmatised person, you’re someone people don’t want to be around.
Sometimes you hear the voice of the person you lost, you suspect this is part of the grieving process but when you tell other people it scares them, some of them worry you’re going to murder them. Everyone agrees the voice means you have a serious illness, a doctor confirms it.
Maybe eventually, like me, you discover a way to process what happened to you and when you do, the feelings almost completely disappear. You wonder why more people don’t know how to deal with grief, why it took this long to find something that works. Then you think about all the people who still don’t know and you realise they’re all around you, that there are millions of them. You finally understand you’ve had to suffer silently because other people don’t like knowing what happened to you.
This is the reality for those of us who’ve had traumatic experiences, often left alone with no tools to manage feelings that are so overwhelming they might consume us. Victims are shamed into silence, creating the situation we have now where the needs of traumatised people are at best ignored and at worst not even known about. The way society supports grieving people shows how different it could be.
