there are so many survivors.
in the book that i'm reading, "trauma and recovery" by judith herman, she talks about the triangle of people involved in an assault. there is the perpetrator, the bystander/potential ally, and the survivor. what the perpetrator asks from the bystander is minimal: they require nothing but silence. what the survivor asks from the bystander in order to emotionally process trauma is to be present with them in their grief, if only for a moment. the bystander will almost always lean towards the request to do less work.
so what would it look like if survivors created a self contained community of caring and support? it's happened before. women have created safe spaces to talk about abuse, to vocalize things that were kept private to maintain the status quo (exploitative relationships): the women's movement, riot grrrl. it is always followed by forgetting and backlash. i wonder if trying to break into the mainstream has anything to do with it; herman says that unless there is a larger societal or political need to co-opt a marginalized struggle in order to further a different agenda, it always stays unnoticed and unattended to. this is because if people really saw how many women are dealing with depression related to abuse at the hands of (primarily) men (or the amount of men silenced about their own abuse), what would that tell them about power structures that still exist, and how much work would have to be done (vs how much work would have to be done to honor the perpetrator)? i've heard from numerous friends, acquaintances, and strangers even, about how the need to create any kind of social change is dead, and the f and a words are now just novelties in history. we've reached the plateau of equality and i'm just beating a dead horse. i don't buy it. if we were allowed space to talk about assault and saw the numbers without discrediting the survivors or just simply forgetting (because it requires no long term strategic plan (or the transitioning and eradication of power), the concept of power and the current dynamics involving who it's distributed to would have to change.
the problem with creating a separatist movement for women that are dealing with post traumatic stress disorder due to abuse (in order to maintain an autonomous movement where we make the decisions) is that the state and society at large do not trust "mad people," or women in general. ptsd also looks like: hysteria, borderline personality disorder, chronic anxiety (and every other form of neurosis attributed directly to women), bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, panic disorder, etc, etc. one of the things that i like about the icarus project is that it is actively working to change stigmatizing ideas about depression and the various clinical ideas surrounding it, to change the culture of mental health and what it means to be healthy vs. mad. one discussion i am not really seeing, at least in the meetings i've been attending, is how our society creates and nurtures "mental disorders." it seems as though a lot of survivors supporting survivors are stuck in the coping-game, and strategizing a systematic change is just too taxing.
i can't help but wonder what a bash back! for "mad people" might look like; if there is no point to mobilizing a group of people that all seem to work in their own conceptions of time, to their own individual experiences with depression and abuse.
i tend to just start talking about my experiences now, but i can see the change in body language happen in other people instantaneously. this reminds me of the triangle, but also that we are not given the tools to support each other (or sometimes ourselves), and a lot of people don't even know where to look for information in order to be an ally. besides, there are so many other forms of pain and suffering that are physically quantifiable. people interacting with depression just look like malingerers, so much so that i've heard people with "diagnosed" bipolar question the validity of their depression and whether they were making it all up. if we can't even acknowledge the reality of our sadness because our society constantly tells us that we're lazy, or making it up, or just "too sensitive," if we buy all of that propaganda despite our emotional memories, what hope do our friends have?
sometimes i feel like people insist on having two separate spaces for these things. "mad people" can have therapy appointments, group sessions (icarus), therapeutic strategies, but it must stay separate from everyday living. i get the impression from a lot of people that it's still taboo, that it's sad if you're dealing with depression and it's not your fault, but there's a time and a place for it. don't crash my party, man.
i say fuck that.
if the time and place to experience abuse is so all encompassing that people are terrified of a survivor-army that will overthrow their privileged asse(t)s, bring it fucking on. talk about it until your tongue falls off, until you forget about why you even brought it up in the first place, until your vocabulary is so taxed that you find yourself using air quotations to make fun of words that start to sound absurd from repetition. the point is not to force people to be present in your experience and pain, the point is to get people to understand how survivors are silenced and self doubting all of the time, and that one of the proven processes to overcoming trauma is to just talk about it. work is involved in anything worth having, and maybe prompting people to examine the exploitation involved in their everyday lives isn't the worst thing that could happen.
it just isn't.