Every experience of personal trauma comes with a story. Over time, that story becomes a wounded piece of who we are. Much of the mistreatment we experience in the world happens as we stumble into the path of others who are running from their darkest story and get run over. And much of the hurt we distribute into the lives of our closest friends and worst enemies happens as a side effect of our attempts to hide from the fear, guilt, shame and sadness that stems from our own darkest story.
Our region is home to a collection of deeply divided communities, each composed of internally divided family and friend groups. We come together and grow apart. We coexist, simmer, rage and repeat. And we will continue to do so until we acknowledge the sad reality that because of the hardest parts of our lives each of us is divided within ourselves.
This experience becomes even more toxic when acted upon by outside forces. For example, ongoing political crises often keep us so inflamed at one another that we are virtually incapable of seeing ourselves. And for people who spend their lives failing to manage emotional pain, that blindness feels like a gift. The never-ending story of the Evil Other might result in the destruction of the world as we know it, but that is a risk we are willing to take in return for absolution from our own brokenness. As long as some other person or group is 100% of the problem, then we are given another day’s relief from our hidden pain. We spend large amounts of time and effort attacking the self-assuredness of our perceived enemies and defending ourselves from the same. And in return we guarantee that the battle will rage again tomorrow. In the end, we ironically need an ever-present enemy in order to feel safe.
We all uniquely share the trauma of living permanently chained to the intersection of our worst moments. Some days we’re the hammer, and other days we’re the nail. We share dark stories pounded into our souls. Worthless. Failure. Disposable. Not Good Enough. We secretly share shame, guilt, anger, fear and sadness. And we shovel those emotions onto each other in fruitless hope of digging a pathway to freedom for ourselves.
But what if it doesn’t have to be this way? What if the Evil Other is neither evil nor other? What if we possess within ourselves the capacity to make our shared space a safer place for each community and individual? If that is the case, then we owe it to each other and ourselves to pursue a different pathway to peace. We have sought peace from the outside in with judgment as our primary weapon. We owe it to ourselves and each other to find our peace from the inside out with compassion as our primary tool.
Turn off your news network and call up your neighbor. Attempt a conversation in which you talk more about the insides of yourselves rather than the antics of your common enemy. Talk about what it feels like to be you rather than consuming the latest social media post of someone pursuing fame by attacking someone else.
If you discover that you’ve become so isolated that you don’t know a single person with whom you could have a sincere conversation and, worse still, that you feel both terrified and ill-equipped to have such a conversation in the first place, welcome to the club. The loss of real community is a loss worth grieving. It is also the root problem of our time. The way forward is for people to honestly seek their own wholeness and to vulnerably seek out others on the same journey.
The fact is that whole people don’t hurt people. And whole people don’t need enemies to feel safe. Whole people understand that parts of themselves are pretty messy, and that all of the rage we pour out on the Evil Other is a poorly masked expression of our own self-hatred. Whole people live in the ongoing struggle of finding peace with themselves. As a result they are safe for others. The pursuit of individual wholeness is the only pathway to creating the conditions necessary for diversity without adversity. May we all find the path together.
Mick Thornton, M.Div., lives in Cortez with his family. He helps organizations, groups and individuals process trauma and find their better story through coaching and consulting. His latest venture is a trauma-informed virtual professional development community hosted at theroutehouse.com.
