I’m killing time in a medical centre waiting room scrolling through my feeds. Twitter’s still talking about the arrest and reported self-harm of Dylan Voller following the “Stolenwealth Games” protest. A headline reads, “Surat [India]: Body of 11-year-old girl found with 86 injuries, autopsy confirms rape.” Tabloids fear world war three in light of US strikes on Syria. The dissonant clanging of Tony Robbins mansplaining #MeToo continues to reverberate. Looking up, my gaze rests on the bold lettering of a family violence brochure: “IT’S TIME TO SAY ENOUGH” (which feminists have been stressing for centuries). I think of my mother. I remember kid me.
It’s also time for a wholesale appreciation of trauma as a historical operative in the present, and transmittable encultured process, time to connect the dots between syndromes of social ills and avoidable “tragedies”.
When I was studying transgenerational trauma as a PhD candidate, people inevitably asked what my thesis was about, and as I answered eyes often glazed over; the idea of trauma transmitting threw them. But the big picture that came into view through my years of research revealed socially structured cyclical traumata founded in patriarchy.
Regardless of cultural differences and guises, or the facilitating economic system – capitalist, communist or feudal – wherever the noxious root of patriarchy has been planted and fertilised by discursive power, unsustainable gardens of grandeur have grown on the blood and bone of subjugated women, children, slaves, invaded and colonised peoples, and nonhuman animals. In other words, conceiving of trauma as a structural force uncovers the way it informs racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism etc.
My new book coins a word to describe the way patriarchy perpetuates trauma, making it “inherently traumatic” and giving rise to a multitude of sufferings and strife: “traumarchy.” I also make the case for the role of memoir in grappling with this tangled business: “I have to speak from the inside out because patriarchy isn’t ‘out there’. Our skin is not an impenetrable barrier against its effects. It infiltrates our beings and shapes our lives – first from the outside in, then from the inside out.”
The implied challenge is complex: we need to specifically address histories of traumatisation in the present, both individually and collectively, via movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and we need to stop viewing socialised trauma as an exceptional event.
Its manifestations in racism, sexism, misogyny, violence, and child abuse are not isolated pathologies. Individuals bear its burdens, but it’s not an individualist phenomenon. Some communities and demographics are more set up for it than others, but that does not make it intrinsically their problem, and it does not make them the problem.
We need to snap out of the fantasy that socialised traumas, like rape and other violent crimes, are aberrations in an otherwise fundamentally commendable and fair society. We need to face the fact that abuses and offences like these are logical and predictable outcomes of a deeply troubled social system built on the belief that some individuals, by virtue of certain sex organs, skin pigmentation, physical ability/normalcy, are inherently superior and more entitled than others.
Rendered bearable, semi-functional, and sometimes profoundly admirable by the everyday goodness and love that escapes, and evolves beyond, the stranglehold of eons of conditioning, we instinctively know there is hope for a better way and a better world.
My personal story is not exceptional. The kind of complex, chronic trauma I’ve experienced is commonplace, epidemically so among girls and women and even more so girls and women of colour. Most women would identify with some aspect of my memoir, and many men, if they’re being honest with themselves, would likely recognise something of themselves. Tim Winton caused a stir with his “sympathy for the devil” take on “toxic masculinity” in a lecture promoting his most recent book by suggesting patriarchy, by degrees, screws us all.
Even those who benefit most from it, or are staunchly wedded to it, are losing in ways they can’t see. Winton advocates “reflection and renewal”. Being a writer, I’ve enacted that by writing a book, but there are countless opportunities, presenting in myriad forms, throughout our days, in which we can take pause to reassess, court change, and choose healing.
Recovery from trauma is possible, but in my experience, and according to the literature of various disciplines, it does not come easily. What is urgently needed is personal and political willingness to metabolise trauma and understand it as a social and political force, a commitment to seeking help even at the cost of inconvenience and discomfort, and adequate, educated, and concrete support for those struggling with the destructive domino effect of millennia of gendered and raced habituation. We need leaders who refuse to reproduce structural trauma and who are teachable. And we need to accept nothing less.
- Meera Atkinson is the author of Traumata (UQP). She will be appearing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival from 2-5 May.
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