Been thinking about this today: People who have had a terrible time don't just integrate into population of people who haven't had a horrible time when horrible time is over. You don't just become a normal person when abnormal suffering ends. In some communities horrible is norm
Bad stuff changes the shape of people. Changes their sense of who they and other people are. Removing the bad stuff doesn't remove the imprint the bad stuff left. That's the bit that I'm not sure people who haven't been through bad stuff get.
I've seen people talking about trauma informed care, and saying 'it's not what's wrong with you, it's what's happened to you' but I have trouble nailing that down to a concrete vision. What does that actually mean? Remove blame and you still have 'the stuff'
And 'the stuff' can make you behave I ways that are harmful to you or to other people, even if it's the result of harm you've experienced yourself. Yes, you are now safe from the original exterior harm, but the harm is still inside you, like a bad software patch
Human beings are pretty delicate things. We're also very powerful things. Bad stuff that happens gets into the delicate workings that influence the powerful ones, like a tiny software bug in the operating system of a huge powerful robot.
Thing about living past and through bad stuff is that ways it changes you don't respect insight or cleverness. I think trauma informed care would have to, in some way, address the question 'how can I be a good person after bad things have happened while finding good for myself?'
There's a sense in which an existential debt needs to be discharged, because having survived long term bad stuff always makes you complicit in the way it changed you. The bad stuff is not your fault, nor is the sum of its effect, but the way it has changed how you act sort of is
Log term bad stuff sort of pushes you out of shape and you don't just snap back. You stay in the shape you once the bad stuff isn't there anymore. And that sometimes means the things you need to do are the things your offensive posture exists to avoid
I suppose what I'm wrestling with and thinking about is that trauma informed care wouldn't just be admitting that trauma happens to people. It would need to be something else entirely. And not useful to consider it as a binary opposite of symptom informed care.
I'm just thinking aloud here, mind you. I don't know the course through this particular channel, I'm just trying to avoid the rocks and not make anything awful for anyone else. Or me.
For anyone interested, I had a stab at writing about at least some of this from a more personal perspective here: inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyl…
And from a more oblique one here: medium.com/@MarkOneinFour…
