Raffo

Spending time being fierce about self care or about individual or collective healing does not shift attention and responsibility from the histories and systems that have created and sustained the disconnection and violence that creates trauma. We know this which is why healing and justice go together.

While dominance starts with a kind of developmental betrayal, supremacy then orders the world around itself to make sure that nothing can ever contradict, harm, or just plain get in to the other side of that separated wall. By ordering the world, I mean using forms of violence and control and minimization and disappearance to keep those with power safe and protected from anything that might be, well, uncomfortable.

How do you hold what happens when they want to step back to let others step forward but still resent it and need some place to bring that resentment? Do we support them to just have their emotions? How do we help them shift so that they can feel connection while they are stepping back, instead of needing to be in the middle to feel alive?

Self-settling or self regulation is our birthright. It’s our ability to bring our own nervous system down when we are overwhelmed. It’s what self care supports. It’s what trauma derails. Self settling can be, like all things, both a tool and a weapon. Self-settling, in this case, is when the person you are sitting with suddenly, in the midst of pain or chaos, is ok. Not ok in a grounded connected way, like deeply with you and what is happening, but ok in their little self enclosed island. You can feel them leave you and when you reach out, attempt to connect, they act as though nothing has changed. Because for them, nothing has. Unconscious self-settling. It’s one of the ways that different forms of supremacy are conditioned into bodies: the ability to leave relationship and retreat into a separated isolated self without actually feeling a sense of disconnection. It’s that kind of moment where the person is saying, “I’m fine over here, all good, the skies are blue, why are you still so upset?” and meanwhile, the world is burning all around them and you are starting to smolder.

Susan Raffo