Tag: Community

First you need to teach people a language of domination. You have to teach them a language that fits hierarchical structures that fits the story. So, you have to teach people moralistic judgment—to think in terms of who is what. Who is royalty? Who are peons? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is normal? Who is abnormal? Language is a critical way of molding people’s minds. You can control people’s minds to a large extent by the language you put in their heads. So, it’s very important that some of the first words you want to get people to hear are the words good, bad, right, wrong, normal, abnormal, should, shouldn’t, have to, and can’t. If you want people to be controllable by authority, the key unit of education is language. What language do you pump into people’s heads?

In der Geschichte des beruflichen Helfens herrschte über Jahrhunderte hin weg eine barmherzige oder eine korrigierend kontrollierende Haltung vor (vgl. Müller 2013): Fürsorge diente in erster Linie dazu, die gesellschaftlichen Strukturen stabil zu halten und Sonderlinge zur Anpassung zu zwingen. Wer sich nicht fügte, wurde von der Gemeinschaft ausgeschlossen. Menschen ein selbstbestimmtes Leben zu eröffnen, war weder erwünscht noch vorgesehen. Sie hatten kaum Einfluss auf Entscheidungen und sollten dankbar sein, dass ihnen geholfen wird. Diese Art der Hilfe und Bevormundung verschlimmerte die Abhängigkeit der Hilfebedürftigen von staatlicher Unterstützung und verstärkte das Gefühl von Hilflosigkeit. Auch heute noch stoßen Menschen, die Unterstützung suchen, oft auf Bevormundung: „Ein Obdachloser sollte sein erbetteltes Geld für Essen ausgeben, nicht für Bier und Zigaretten! Wozu braucht eine Sozialhilfeempfängerin einen Internetzugang?“

If you expose a problem, you pose a problem; if you pose a problem; you become the problem. The management of a problem becomes the management of a person. In other words, one way of dealing with a problem is to stop people from talking about it or to make the people who talk about it go away. If people stop talking about the problem, or the people who talk about it go away, it can then be assumed that the problem has gone away. I hear an instruction here. We are being told to stop talking about problems or go away.

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.

It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law. Women who have sought justice in the legal system commonly compare this experience to being raped a second time.

“In that moment [of experiencing harassment], I would have really benefited, I think, from a peer support network … what I would have wanted … is just access to other women who had gone through this experience.” (Midcareer South Asian-American woman freelance journalist)

“The magic of any kind of group work or therapy is just being seen. Just having the opportunity to be heard and to be seen and to be listened to is actually really profound for people.” (Michael Mitchell, Peer Support Coordinator, Whitman-Walker)

Sharing the traumatic experience with others is a precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world. In this process, the survivor seeks assistance not only from those closest to her but also from the wider community. The response of the community has a powerful influence on the ultimate resolution of the trauma.

Restoration of the breach between the traumatized person and the community depends, first, upon public acknowledgment of the traumatic event and, second, upon some form of community action. Once it is publicly recognized that a person has been harmed, the community must take action to assign responsibility for the harm and to repair the injury. These two responses – recognition and restitution – are necessary to rebuild the survivor’s sense of order and justice.

Trauma is the defense of the abused against the perpetrators’ will to make their crimes forgotten. […] Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial. In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.

Aversion to conflict is aversion to relationship. On a social level we don’t simply live with those we personally know. We don’t only impact those who know our names. Dialogue is a precondition for society. And painful conflict is one of its crucial tests.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

Jeder unwillkommene Konflikt hinterlässt Wunden in der Gemeinschaft. Es geht nicht um die Lösung des Konfliktes, sondern um die Heilung der Gemeinschaft.