Politics of trauma

One of my running Twitter refrains has been:

We need a politics which is supportive of people who been traumatized and recognizes that they will often misread threats as greater than they are and respects that they will often register real threats which others cannot see.

Dreading a Twitterpocalypse, I have captured a Twitter thread about a personal encounter with the implications plus some threads relevant to that refrain by various other people:

• Politics, identity, and trauma
• Tone policing
• The culture of emergent radical movements
• Distinguishing abuse from “drama”
• Distinguishing harm, violence, and abuse
• On being “trauma-informed”
• A deadpan joke

Politics, identity, and trauma

There is a long thread by Pete Wolfendale on my page of quotations about ADHD which is also relevant here. A snippet:

It’s worth recalling the ‘trigger warning wars’ that raged from academia, to the internet, to mainstream culture a few years ago. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear both that trigger warnings were useful for those with PTSD and that they got entangled with identitarian trends in unhelpful ways.

To be clear, I mean the ways in which specific sorts of trauma and trauma responses became seen as validators of identity positions, or even sources of insight, encouraging some to imitate and even cultivate heightened sensitivities as a way of authenticating themselves.

It’s easy to see this as a sort of psychic harm. The misapplication of categories meant to improve self-understanding and thereby personal autonomy in a way that actually impedes both.

Tone policing

A thread by Foz Meadows:

here's today’s piping hot take: at some point, the left is going to have to reckon with how the concept of tone policing, which was & is its own necessary issue, has been coopted and weaponised by people who want an excuse to act like raging assholes without being called on it.

like!! my understanding is that tone policing arose specifically as a conversation around how WOC in general and Black women in particular were punished for not sounding gentle when discussing their own oppression, pointing out problis or addressing abuse. and that matters!

but this is very much not the same as approaching every piece of discourse with a combative, You Must Be Perfect Or I Will Destroy You, deeply bad faith mindset that is every bit as toxic as redditor trolls hatespamming strangers, then claiming it's tone policing to object.

just... it feels increasingly apparent that a disconcerting number of people aren't interested in justice, or good faith engagement, or admitting that people don’t tend to learn by being screamed at. they just want to vent and rage and move on. and like.

obviously, we all have bad days. some issues hit closer to home than others. but there's a difference between that and a habitual pattern of assuming the worst of people, screaming at them for it, mocking any attempt at dialogue as wilful complicity, and just being an asshole.

as frustrating as it can be to acknowledge, if you yell at an abuse someone for being wrong, even if you’re 100% right, you’ve just drastically lowered the incentive for the other person to self-reflect and reconsider. but if you're not hoping for self-reflection, why engage?

venting anger can be productive and healthy in specific contexts, but yelling at strangers or semi-strangers on the internet is almost never that. in fact, it tends to create a toxic feedback loop that is overall worse for our mental health, not better.

what makes this worse is poor reading comprehension — sometimes the result of active bad faith, but sometimes not. a single tweet is a finite thing: by definition, it cannot contain a detailed rider explaining tone and ruling out every possible unlikely interpretation -

and yet, every day on this cursed bird app, you'll see people getting mad at someone because they read a thing, thought, “hey, there's some ambiguity in those 280 characters! that must be both deliberate and malicious re: the thing they're saying!” and decide to go full asshole

online, there’s three types of apology for fucking up: sincere (I realise and agree I fucked up), insincere (I’m doing this because I have to, not because I agree) and terrified (I don’t know if I did anything wrong but I’m being yelled at and don’t have the bandwidth to risk it)

that third kind of apology, the terrified apology? overwhelmingly, that’s what you get when you dogpile, harass & abuse as a means of telling someone they did bad. you’re not trying to get them to actually see the issue; you're punishing them for having failed to get it already.

if all it took to convince someone that they did or said the wrong thing, or that their POV was flawed, was saying “hey bud, that's wrong!” followed by instant epiphany, the world would be a real fuckin’ different place than it is, I tell you what. but it’s not like that at all.

is is frustrating that it can take people time to reevaluate a stance or belief? yeah! but that is how people are, and if your entire social justice MO is based on a need for instant apologies after slinging abuse in lieu of dialogue, you’re asking for fear, not change.

I’m just. so, so tired of seeing people act like assholes and then sit around crowing about how cool they were for yelling at anyone who pointed out they were acting like assholes. you can be angry or passionate without being a total fuckmuppet online.

jumping back on this thread to add: not all the time, but sometimes, I genuinely believe people's bad faith interpretations stem from a desire to find an angle from which to analyse or respond to a tweet that everyone else has missed: to be Clever On Main.

this phenomenon isn’t unique to twitter, but the way engagement works here makes it an easy trap to fall into. a person sees a popular tweet and thinks, ‘I want to respond to that, but in a new way, a clever way that nobody else has thought of, so I’ll stand out!’

but this doesn't always lead to insightful analysis. what it more often leads to, I would argue, is people looking for the least obvious takes - which, by definition, are the ones most likely to have been missed up front - and treating them as if they should be obvious. this has the simultaneous effect of:

1. making that person look clever for having seen the thing that nobody else did
2. reinvigorating the discourse (& thus the tweet’s & their own metrics) by driving new engagement
3. driving the conversation further from the original point

I want to stress, again, that looking for new perspectives & original analysis is not, of itself, bad. what I’m specifically talking about is what happens when people go looking for Exciting New Takes at the expense of acknowledging context, nuance and reason.

one of the most common ways this form of bad faith engagement manifests is to offer a snarky critique of something beloved or which is being harmlessly enjoyed, as if to finger-wag at anyone who dared to be happy about it.

are people allowed to have their own opinions? of course! but there’s often a deliberate decision to piggyback a negative opinion on a positive one, via tags and QTs, specifically to appear cleverer or better at analysis than the original, rather than posting in parallel.

another way for bad faith to flourish is to deliberately elide the context in which the original speaker is posting to chide them for failing to consider something outside the original scope of the discussion. this relates back to the issue of tweets being necessarily finite.

you cannot reasonably expect a single tweet or a single thread to reference Everything even tangentially related to that topic, and a glaring omission is not the same as “I chose to focus on this one issue or context specifically.”

it's easy to use one person’s thread as a starting point in a positive way, to say “speaking of this, here’s a related issue” and begin a new discussion. a bad faith take will fault the OP for being specific and present themselves as an authority on the “real” issue.

these are just two examples, but they’re part of a pattern I see a lot, and it gets really fucking exhausting really quickly. just. for how quick they are to mock the concept of edgelords, some people are really kinda committed to being edgelords.

The culture of emergent radical movements

A thread by Gwen Snyder:

It’s vitally important for organizers to understand that mass movement spaces attract

1. potential new activists but also
2. lonely/traumatized folks looking for a social home
3. bored people chasing excitement, and
4. opportunists looking to steal glow for fame and/or profit

That was one of the aspects of Occupy that made it such a powerful learning space: those dynamics were in place from Day 1. Organizing at Occupy meant negotiating the triggers of the deeply traumatized, trying to outsmart the grifters in real time, sifting through the bored folks to see who actually cared & would do work. 90% of engaging that space was managing the triggered, the greedy, the bored.

I love emergent mass movement. I think it’s dynamic, inspiring, powerful, and full of potential. At the same time, it isn’t actually an organized community when it emerges. It's a chaotic gathering created by people attracted to the idea of organized community and its power.

That attraction doesn't necessarily translate to wanting to be organized. A lot of folks are looking for a space that can heal them, a space that can entertain them, a space they can harvest power and/or money and/or fame from.

Good organizing can help folks locate resources to heal (and does), but it is not by itself a healing art.

Good organizing is organized and accountable, not particularly entertaining.

Good organizing is about building collective power, which does not benefit grifters.

The grifters will undermine good organizing in emergent mass movement to redirect power / attention / $ towards themselves.

The people looking to be entertained will manufacture unnecessary conflict in order to stave off boredom.

There are going to be traumatized people in need of deep healing whose triggers will inevitably be triggered. That almost always means conflict that descends into negotiating those triggers and very often derails organizing.

That doesn’t mean good organizing can’t happen in emergent movement space, but it does mean organizers who attempt that work have to approach with humility and an understanding that the space is not organized and not something we created.

Otherwise we become part of the problem.

If you’ve ever done this sort of organizing, you almost certainly know that, like clockwork, organizers/organizations show up to trendy emergent movements to claim ownership. It never goes well.

It’s been especially hard to watch this dynamic play out with the movement that emerged backing Bernie Sanders. There were a lot of good organizers involved in his campaign, but the movement that backed him was largely emergent, not organized. A lot of folks mistook the emergent Bernie movement for organized movement. That simply wasn’t the case.

Bernie wisely began campaigning back at the end of the Occupy era, & owes a lot of his momentum to his successful bid to capitalize on that very chaotic emergent movement.

That’s not to say plenty of smart organizers didn’t do smart organizing work for Bernie, but anyone who thinks Bernie mania was an organized space or primarily a product of disciplined organizing is not someone who understands the Bernie movement and/or organizing. A lot of people made that mistake, though, including people who really should have known better. A lot of people thought— or, pretended— that the political movement around Bernie was well-organized instead of emergent.

When you pretend a space is organized rather than emergent, your attitude towards everything in that space (even the toxic stuff) becomes, “oh well we meant to do that.” It’s a dynamic that makes grifters absolutely salivate. Once leaders/organizers are pretending that the chaos of emergent space is intentional and organized, it gives folks in that space the ability to do almost whatever the hell they want with relative impunity, as long as they’re still generally towing the party line.

The party line for the emergent Bernie movement didn’t involve any kind of intersectional analysis, which made it easy for grifters to use racism and sexism to enhance their grift.

The grifters made money and careers playing to the bored and the triggered, using the liberation movements of trans folks, women and Black folks, in particular as scapegoats. They made a game out of using oppressed people for target practice, and profited off it.

One of the great shortcomings of the 2016 Bernie campaign was its failure to practice humility and understand that it was riding a wave of emergent movement, not manufacturing that movement by way of their own genius. Staffers really thought they built that shit themselves. They didn't have a plan to manage grifters. They didn’t do anything once the grifters told the traumatized to blame women / trans folks / Black folks / intersectionality for their trauma. They didn't have a plan for grifters turning the bored into a white supremacist troll army.

When we look at the Grayzone zombies and the dregs of the dirtbag left, we need to understand that what we are looking at is the aftermath of political leaders mistaking an emergent populist movement for an organized electoral campaign. We need to understand that although Bernie made a canny and successful play to harness post-Occupy economic populism, the 2016 Bernie campaign was always playing catch-up with its own base, and the 2020 Bernie campaign was ultimately a circus starring toxic grifters.

(And btw, I know a lot of folks who are good organizers and have good politics and worked for Bernie and did good work, so please don't read this as a blanket condemnation of folks who organized on that campaign. Both times the probli was top-level campaign leadership.)

Once you understand that a significant number of people who come to emergent mass movement are seeking entertainment, not liberation, you learn to watch for the people who try to tell the bored that they can have their cake (privilege) and be part of the fun of the circus, too. These “entertainer” grifters show up, do no meaningful work, and try to hijack the movement, turning it into their personal stage. They pull it off by looking for the bored and entitled, playing to their entitlient (by writing off the liberation of others), and convincing them that anti-liberatory violence and harassment are actually acts of virtue.

That’s what Chapo Trap House and Greenwald and Rogan and Blumenthal and all this “left” grifter-entertainers do. They have no meaningful moral compass. They play to their audience's economic anxieties and toxic entitlient in equal measure. They aren’t thought leaders, they’re derivative grifters profiting off a movement they didn’t lift a finger to build. They make money — lots of it — equating white male insecurity with leftism and teaching their followers to feel like “real leftist” politics are reactionary. These “leftist” grifters aren't here to lead on collective action that lifts all boats, they're toxic individualists hoping to profit off the ignorance of lifestyle “leftists” by falsely (but entertainingly) marketing their anti-liberatory self-pity as space communism.

At the end of the day, those of us who care about and practice organizing within liberatory movement need to do a better job of mapping the dynamics of emergent mass movement, naming the predictable dysfunctions early, and acting prophylactically.

Emergent mass movements are spaces of great potential. Our organizing may create space for them, but that doesn't mean we own them or make them ourselves.

Grifters get it. We need to play catch up, or they'll just keep diverting the energy towards their own profit/fame game.

When the US left’s candidates and movement spaces create platforms & audiences for Nazi apologists during a global wave of fascism, for anti-vaxxers during a global pandemic, something has gone very, very wrong. We need to learn from that embarrassing, dangerous reality, fast.

If we don’t, we’re part of the problem.

The end.

Distinguishing abuse from “drama”

A thread by David Forbes:

One of the most insidious dynamics out there is that actual dangerous things (serial abuse, rampant bigotry, open corruption) get dismissed as petty drama while actual petty drama gets treated as a danger.

“I won’t work with that person/ group because they don’t view me as human / actively wish me harm /are repeatedly abusive “ isn’t “carceral” or “divisive” it’s beyond justified.

“I won’t work with someone because we had a minor tactical disagreement / polycule drama 3 years ago” is not.

But the reverse is often what happens. This isn’t an abstract issue. Communities and efforts routinely get shattered because too many indulge an influential abuser, open transmisogyny, or all resources being directed to a small clique/grift (to pick just a few examples).

On the other end, relatively small - or even entirely fabricated - issues get blown up as reasons for sudden exile or demonization (indeed, sometimes this is done by the bigoted, abusive and corrupt).

This is insidious because it’s what seems to do an incredible amount of internal damage but without really any immediate solution at hand. These are deep-seated cultural problis, addressing them is necessary and it’s also incredibly difficult.

Way less deference to influential (and often highly privileged / connected to npic “organizers,” more prioritization of discernment / investigative skills and hard boundaries against abuse are all necessary.

The rot’s also deep. Things ain’t hopeless, but they ain’t good.

Distinguishing harm, violence, and abuse

A thread by Emily D Warfield:

Took me way too many years to realize that the scariest people aren’t the ones who yell when they’re mad but the ones who will repeatedly hurt you while maintaining perfect emotional regulation, so that you’re the crazy one if you show any visible distress

Ftr, I am not saying that screaming at people is the way to go. I’m just saying it’s much easier to recognize as hurtful and, therefore, take appropriate steps to protect yourself emotionally and mentally

diagonally spinning rat comments:

This is one of the reasons I think it’s important to recognize that emotional regulation is a learned skill, not a quasi-moral attribute

100% this. Also, I think, in being able to expand our discussions about harm. We quite rightly spend a lot of time talking about the warning signs of abuse, but this kind of behavior isn’t necessarily abusive. It’s invalidating.

We harm one another in so many ways that aren’t (necessarily) abuse — invalidation, deception, abandonment. What would it take to be able to properly acknowledge and repair this? Quoting myself:

Idk why so many of you are hellbent on redefining every shitty or even outright cruel thing people do-- lying, cheating, ghosting-- as abusive. Is it that you feel your hurt is only legitimate if you were abused? Because that's not true!

I do think that if you live long enough you will eventually hurt someone badly enough to be the villain in their story. Unless you learn how to repair and transform that, and so few of us do. Quoting myself:

The main thing you have to strive for in life is to not wind up as the antagonist in someone else’s memoirs, and unfortunately I speak from experience here

This despite the fact that most of us aren’t abusers and never will be.

I’m not really sure how to conclude this except to say that I hope we all keep trying to figure out how to do better by each other.

the quote above links to this long, related thread:

Idk why so many of you are hellbent on redefining every shitty or even outright cruel thing people do — lying, cheating, ghosting — as abusive. Is it that you feel your hurt is only legitimate if you were abused? Because that's not true!

The worst pain anyone’s every caused me wasn't physical or sexual assault or abuse. It wasn't even emotional abuse. It was a man I trusted completely and rearranged my life for ending my relationship with him and then his daughter I helped raise, with no warning or explanation

That’s shitty, that’s cruel, but that’s not abuse. It is not a pattern of seeking control through violence. It’s not even violence! And yet it has still left me with a profound sense of loss and an inability to trust. My pain can be valid without my ex being a violent abuser.

We need terms like 'gaslight’ (which is not the same thing as authoritarian propaganda, i.e. Donald Trump cannot gaslight you unless you're in an intimate relationship with him) and 'abuse’ because we have to be able to define problis in order to solve them.

I don't think we can solve all of human cruelty, but if we’re going to try we need to be precise about behaviors and motivations and you calling everything abuse is stopping us from doing that.

Harm (e.g. lying, ghosting, cheating), violence (which would include sexual consent violations), and abuse (patterns of violence) all have different meanings. This would be easier if I could draw it out but:

• We all cause harm.
• Some harm is violence.
• Some violence is abuse.

All of these things are bad and should be addressed but need to be addressed differently, because the psychology and power dynamics of someone who causes harm is different from someone who abuses, and that’s why we need to keep the definitions separate.

An example: we very often cause harm unintentionally through misunderstandings that escalate. Mediation can be super useful here because it helps restore mutual understanding and get around communication blocks. Mediation processes will be manipulated by abusers.

Another example: many people in abusive relationships eventually use violence in self-defense against their abusers. They are then often punished by the state, which usually fails to take power dynamics and the psychology of abuse into account, and will treat a woman who shot her abusive husband while he was sleeping because this was the only 'out’ she could find, the same as an abusive husband who shoots his sleeping wife. Even though only the latter is a continued risk to the community.

If you're someone who lies to a woman and emotionally manipulates her to get her to have sex with you, you’re doing something shitty and it needs to be addressed, but it’s going to be addressed differently than someone who uses force, fraud, or coercion to get sex, i.e. a rapist.

And if you were hurt, whether it be through harm, violence, or abuse, your pain, anger, grief are all valid and you deserve the support of your friends, family, community and (if you want!) a therapist in order to find healing. But again, those supports may look different.

Someone may even have trauma from experiencing harm that wasn’t abuse. If a mom gets distracted while driving and gets into an accident with a kid in the backseat, the kid may very well have trauma related to the accident. But how we treat both the kid and mom is going to be different than an accident with the same physical effects caused by Mom choosing to drive drunk (neglect) or Mom deciding to punish the entire family by swerving into a ditch (abuse).

I don’t want to get too far off in the weeds about psychological trauma but the most severe trauma is usually correlated with intentional interpersonal violence (whether that be war or child abuse) rather than extent of injury which tells us that it often has more to do with our sense of trust in others than our sense of physical safety. So intent does matter for healing, but it’s only one of many factors.

Forcing myself to sign off but I’m a women's studies BA in my last year of an MSW taking several classes on violence against women and am also a survivor of multiple forms of gendered harm, violence, and abuse from individuals + the state so follow for more fun trauma takes.

This thread was in response to the below tweet. I can't control where this thread winds up but if I catch anyone on here trying to minimize or invalidate abuse (ง •̀_•́)ง

Heather O'Neill <@lethal_heroine>

If you have sex with someone knowing full well it is going to be a one time thing, but the other person believes they are embarking on a relationship, I don't think you can really consider the sex consensual (Although this opinion gets me into trouble at dinner parties.)

Checked in on replies and quote tweets and a lot of folks are objecting to say that lying, cheating and ghosting can be part of a pattern of abuse and yes, that’s true. Lots of crappy things can be part of a pattern of abuse that are not by themselves abuse. I hope that’s clear.

On being “trauma-informed”

Ms. Petey says:

“Trauma Informed” does not mean “I have trauma, so I can relate.”

“Trauma Informed” does not mean “I’ll be ‘extra nice’ because people have trauma.”

“Trauma Informed” indicates:

I am educated and aware of physiological, social and psychological effects of trauma in general; and, I am interested and intentional about understanding and accommodating your specific needs as they relate to your personal trauma.

I will tell only the truth, with compassion. I will believe you, and give you the benefit of the doubt.

I will recognize that you are not “other” to my own humanity. (Race, gender, sex, orientation, or any socio-economic construct)

I will avoid “wishing” upon you my perception of “healing” and will listen to and accommodate to the best of my ability your needs around safety and support.

I recognize that you cannot safely be authentic and vulnerable unless I am. (Which includes healthy boundaries)

I will welcome and respect your personal boundaries, and I will take responsibility for communicating mine in a safe, constructive manner.

I will always err on the side of not violating anyone’s privacy.

I will not presume any entitlement to information about you that is outside the appropriate level of intimacy of our relationship.

I will never shame you for your painful emotions or suggest that your suffering is a problem that would be solved by altering your perception.(Gaslighting)

I will never prescribe “faith” as a substitute for resourced solutions to practical problems. (Gaslighting)

I will not presume to understand the intricacies of relationships that are not mine. I will not assume that what makes me feel safe will make you feel safe. I will never play the “two to tango” card. (Victim blaming)

I will not assume that emotional “instability” suggests emotional “inaccuracy.”

I will never suggest that you have any duty of “reconciliation” with an abuser from whom you have worked so hard to extract yourself physically, emotionally and socially... no matter who it is.

I will avoid platitudes, obscure metaphors and inspirational dogma that have nothing to do with the practical details of your experience.

I will not make your experience with me about my own self-worth.

I will own my ego and emotional triggers and take responsibility for addressing them appropriately when (not if) I feel unsafe or make you feel unsafe with them.

I will respect the decisions you make about your own healing journey.

I will do my best to refer or recommend other resources rather than venture out of the scope of my own supportive capacity.

I will accept the responsibility of removing myself from a therapeutic relationship if our needs and boundaries are incompatible.

This list is certainly not exhaustive.

If you use the term “Trauma Informed,” please understand what you are saying.

A deadpan joke

for moral convenience we will be breaking down all human behavior into two categories: Privileges and Traumas. Privileges will be bad and Traumas will be good. this will make discourse far more efficient allowing you more time to divest yourself of Privileges and acquire Traumas.

Social justice advocacy is tricky. This tweet from Compulsory Heteropessimism echoes what opponents of social justice dishonestly pretend to believe is the whole of how social justice advocacy works … and the joke would not land at all if there were nothing to the critique.