Learning to tell the difference between appeasement and care
Notes on an incredible book "Nervous", watching, listening and reading recommendations and personal reflections from my own marriage.
“As a society we deal with unresolved trauma as if we were each independent, as opposed to interdependent. The approach is reactive and does not address traumatic systems at their source. While we can achieve a certain amount of trauma healing through individual, downstream interventions, logic and science show us that we can only achieve community-wide health if our larger environments change upstream as well.
This is what it means to become trauma-wise, rather than trauma responsive or even trauma-informed. When we become trauma-wise, we accept trauma as part of living, but work towards more equitable and coordinated systems for addressing its long term harms. The work of being trauma-wise requires a vision ample enough to reorganize society toward trauma prevention on a collective scale.
As Judith Herman writes, trauma work is fundamentally collective and political since it brings into focus whole populations of people affected by traumatic experiences of oppression. As Aurora Levins Morales suggests, trauma healing, at its root, is therefore the work of systemic political and cultural change. This process looks less like traditional medicine that treats disease as problems of individual bodies, and more like the integrated work of watershed management, which takes an ecosystems approach toward the well-being approach of all living things.” (250)
Recently, I read an incredible book called Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano.
This book is about one person’s journey into their personal and cultural heritage in order to heal their nervous system. I picked up this book because of this sentence in the introduction: “My hands smoulder and my wrists feel riddled with broken glass. On any given day, my nerves are either drowned or lit on fire.” (p.1) When I read it, I was standing upright in a bookstore, but I swayed, the feeling of being seen so disorientating that for a moment I felt dizzy. It was an apt description of how my hands have felt this year and the pain that shapes and accompanies my everyday experiences. I bought it with hopes of fellowship and companionship.
I also bought the book thinking that I would move smoothly from a description of pain to an outline of a few easy, linear steps I could follow to resolve my own symptoms. This of course, was not what I found. Instead, I found a beautifully written, non linear journey structured around five sections: neurogenesis, neural pruning, neuro regulation, neuroplasticity and neuromimicry.
These words were new to me, and this is how the author describes them:
Neurogenesis: Author Jen Soriano describes this section of the book as being about “the origins of heritage, in which I seek the source of my chronic pain and what shaped my developing nervous system.” (19)
Neural pruning: In this section of the book, the author traces ”how trauma and resilience can be transmitted across generations.” (85)
Neuroregulation: Defined “in therapeutic terms, as the nervous system’s ability to move fluidly between parasympathetic and sympathetic states of rest and activation. Also, the collective work of maintaining bodily functions like metabolism, heart rate and breathing.” (134). Author Jen Soriano describes this section of the book as “where my healing journey begins from ritual and collective stewardship to harmonizing with the nervous systems of others.” (134)
Neuroplasticity: “The capacity of neurons and neural networks to change, particularly in response to repeated use, environmental stimuli, and new information.” (188). The author describes this section as “where the journey continues, tracing the possibility of reshaping our nervous systems toward interdependence.” (188)
Neuromimicry: “The process of drawing inspiration from nervous system design and applying it to the way we care for one another and our environments. Where our journey ends in reflecting and envisioning a trauma-wise future.” (222)
Across these sections the author delves into her experiences of trauma within her family of origin, and the transgenerational trauma her family has experienced through the colonial history of the Philippines. This book is history, (I didn’t realize until I read this book how little I knew about the history of colonization in the Philippines and its relationship with the US) it is a love letter to somatics and healing, it is research, it is testimony to the possibilities of healing and how these ideas have lived within the author’s life.
It delves into what it is like to live with pain as a constant companion, how pain can drain your life of colour and meaning and make it difficult to keep going, and the collective care that can help you move towards healthier ways of being. I found it a beautiful, honest and difficult read about the non linear, deeply challenging path of healing. This book is about looking at the past, the present, and trying to create new futures within your family. It’s a tremendous, carefully researched book that is honest about how resource intensive the process of healing trauma is.
This book also highlighted that healing is a lifelong journey and chronic pain does not disappear. (So please, if you have a friend that has chronic pain, please don’t start conversations with the question: “Are you healed yet?” “How are you feeling?” “How is your health?” “What are the updates?” All of these questions are hard to hear.)
My reading notes from the book can be found below, beneath the paywall. To access the notes, please subscribe.
“Living alongside my parents’ relationship encouraged me an inclination to let male figures in my life set the tone for my relationship with them, to respond to their mood and desire rather than meet them with my own. I’ve so often found myself pleasing, placating, managing - perhaps thinking that’s how I needed to be to receive someone’s love. The older I’ve become the more appalled I am to my own pliability.” (Arrangements in Love, 2023, p.17)
Enroute to Washington DC recently I watched a Netflix movie called Sukhee, a story about a woman in her forties named Sukhpreet who is a mother to a 15 year old, and a wife for 20 years. She is tired of being taken for granted by everyone around her. She is bored of her life, her neighbours, and is increasingly unable to recognise herself from the person she was in her university days. In sum, she is unhappy. When she sees a message about an upcoming 20 year college reunion, she desperately wants to go and see her friends again, connect with her hometown of Delhi, and repair her estranged relationship with her parents. For a significant portion of the film she puzzles over the question: how to get permission from her husband for her trip? And what will happen if she just decides to go on her own? She has responsibilities after all. She is a mother.
This film is not a masterpiece by any stretch of that word, but I found myself entranced by its simple story. The central conflict within it is: Will she be allowed to go? Should she even be complaining? Shouldn’t she just be grateful for all the ways that her partner’s patriarchy is different from other men in the neighbourhood? Why ask for more?
We all have specific places of wounding and trigger and for me, the word “let” scratches me at the bone. It contains within it the meaning of permission. Of allowing one access into a place or space that would not otherwise be available. It means that there is a petitioner and a petitioned. A leader and a supplicant. A powerful one and a powerless one.
There is a similar dynamic in Etaf Rum’s incredible book “Evil Eye”. The protagonist desperately wants to be the faculty sponsor for an all expenses paid trip to Europe at the college where she teaches, but it is difficult to get permission from her spouse to attend. How does she deal with this?
That is not my own home reality, but being in such a dynamic terrifies me. At the same time, I know I am shaped by cultural and social conditioning that makes revolving around men feel very familiar.