Dismantling the Divide on Election Day
It hit me one day after a workout at the gym: Trauma survivors who have not yet learned that it is safe to be around other people with differing opinions may easily misunderstand those people with differing opinions to be a source of danger in the world.
When we survive Trauma in life, the soul becomes instantaneously fragmented. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, that is known as the Shen leaving the body and escaping to somewhere safe. The Shen leaves the Spirit Storehouse point located in our heart center and will not return until it is deemed safe enough.
Often, the Shen has to be called back into the body. Sometimes that requires the help of a highly trained healer to do so. Once the Shen is back in the body, the person who has experienced Trauma can begin a much deeper and integrated healing process.
So, doesn’t it make sense that a nation of Traumatized people may be easily pitted against one another after experiencing Trauma (2020 lock-downs, deaths of loved ones, etc…) and being manipulated by a media conglomerate that collectively speaks the same message of hate, violence, and doom. . . ?
Think about it: how do you feel right now? It’s election day. Are you preparing for a Civil War? Are you concerned about the grid failing and mass riots in every major city? Are you too afraid to go to the polling stations for fear of terrorist attack?
We have more people on the ballot today than in previous recent elections, but the mainstream media is only reporting on two separate political party candidates: former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris. There are many who fear if Trump is not deemed president, he and his followers will retaliate and bring even more civil unrest and a possible civil war to our homeland. Blah…blah…blah….
We have illusions being spun about by the Left and the Right. Politics has become the art of manipulation and tearing down our fellow humans in the name of the highest funded agenda. Enough is enough. This rhetoric of “Us versus Them” is outdated and immature at best.
United we stand. Divided we fall. Don’t you think it’s easier to be conquered by a corrupt government when we’re too busy hating each other to realize we’re being abused by our own elected officials at large?
It’s time to be better, people. It’s time to realize our media was created by Edward Bernayse - the Father of American Public Relations and Public Media. In a fantastic and educational article written by Peter Edwards in Global Gypsum Magazine, the author explains that Edward Bernayse partnered with the United States Government when we joined WWI to promote pro-war propaganda for American audiences and abroad (link to article here).
I encourage you to go to your local library and do more research about E. Bernays. You’ll also quickly learn of his infamous relation……. Sigmund Freud. Make your own educated decisions.
Steve Reich’s 1960s tape loops were mind-blowing. One in particular, “Come Out to Show Them” utilizes the tape recording of a minister preaching in the American South in the 1960s to a large group of people at a gathering that supported racial equality in our country. “When you cut open the bruise and let the bruised-blood bleed, you see we all bleed the same no matter the color of our skin; You have to let open the bruise and let the bruised-blood bleed to come out and show them…” This is a very visceral way to say, “we all bleed the same when we are cut.” My interpretation, we are all Human. We have more in common that we think we do.
My great grandparents on both sides of my family escaped slaughter and persecution in their motherlands of Prussia and Italy to seek refuge in the United States of America. The same probably goes for some of you. Many of us are third or fourth generation residents of this land. Refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine have come to our country in this decade seeking the very same refuge that many of your ancestors and my ancestors sought. So, why be so judgemental…?
I live in Taos, NM. I am a humble neighbor to the Taos Pueblo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to some of the most amazing, strong, resilient and talented people I have ever met in my life - The Pueblo People of Taos Pueblo. I once asked a Pueblo man whom I befriended many years ago, how is it that he could ever get along with and accept a whole different culture and religion he never asked to accept but was forced to; he told me that at some point one realizes that you have to assimilate to survive, but you keep hold of who you truly are and be that when you can safely.
I wanted to cry. I was really hoping he was going to tell me something more bright. But he gave me something much more valuable: The Truth.
As a woman who is one of the one-in-three women who experience sexual assault, I was livid. I was angry. I hated most men. I hated the Patriarch. I hated myself for letting myself succumb to my assailants. I hated my father and brother for grooming me to take sexual abuse and later sexual assault. I hated my mother for telling me to remain silent after she interrupted the neighborhood boy while he was molesting me in my childhood home. I shamed myself for how I responded to being assaulted so many times and the thirty-six years it took me to finally awaken to all the sexual traumas I had experienced. I eventually remembered all the situations stemming from childhood that led me to be the kind of woman who found herself in dangerous situations with dangerous men and failed to run the other direction. This remembrance occurred and evolved over years of dedicated and focused healing with many different healers and teachers and a few decent psychologists. I lost many friends in the process. I put up stark boundaries of no-contact with specific family members who had abused me. Today, as I write this blog post, I am still kind of angry. But now I have tools to help me hold space for my anger, and I let my anger serve me as I serve it. Matt Kahn, Author and Spiritual Teacher, says if we’re angry about something, it means you have to do something about it. This is me doing something more about it. I’m still on my healing journey and always will be a sexual assault survivor. The difference is I am no longer letting that define the totality of who I am. The difference is my Shen came home finally. The difference is when you look into my eyes, you see that someone is home; you see I have my light turned on. Whereas before I faced my pain, pictures of me show my eyes dull in color and one eye is looking elsewhere entirely.
Four years after I heard my Pueblo friend tell me his truth, it hit me . . . Every time I heard someone express another way of existing that differed from mine, I became triggered; I would feel unsafe in the presence of their different point of view. I felt judged by everyone even if they were not judging me.
This is fundamentally the same as the fear and hate many of us have for the opposite political candidate and their supporters.
Honestly, to other another for holding a different opinion than you (no matter what that opinion may be) is a very immature way of handling other people’s differences, don’t you think? When we are children, we are taught to be accepting of others who are different from us. But then we grow up and become adults and many of us seem to forget that teaching. We join organizations like PeaceCoprs and blindly shove our self-determined “superior” ways of living onto people who lead different lifestyles. When you peel back the layer of the onion, you find an abrasive smell that tends to make your eyes water, but we forget how hard it is to see when our eyes are flooded with tears. . .
I wasn’t always the person who would become triggered by other people’s beliefs. In fact, I was quite the opposite, but after the Traumas continued to pile on I eventually reached a breaking point in my mid-thirties. “We only change when the pain of staying the same becomes too great,” said Master Teacher Jeffrey Boehme, in a meditation workshop I took in February of 2020. He was totally right.
Perhaps our country is reaching its breaking point, and what if that’s a productive thing…?
What if assimilation is no longer the answer…? What if it is…? What if it was until very recently…?
What if assimilation looks different today than it did even four years ago…?
What if we honored every person’s right to freely choose what they feel is best for them? Isn’t that how you want to be treated?
I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a few productive ideas:
What if we just gave up anger and hate for one day and instead of taking our triggers out on other people directly we write about the triggers in our journals or talk it out in front of the mirror or with a loved one at home….?
What if, even if just for today, you honored your own inner authentic Truth?
What if you begin to listen to that inner knowing instead of repeating old behavior patterns that leave you feeling empty…?
Seriously.
Because the way we collectively treat one another in this country is deplorable, and it’s perpetuated by the violent media and your own insatiable hunger for violence driven by your darker shadows that you have not yet loved and acknowledged. The media wouldn’t keep creating what they are creating if we didn’t collectively eat it up.
Maybe it’s time we change our collective diet.
Do you have? If so, kindly s something to add to this conversation? If so, please kindly speak up! We’re all in this together, after all, whether we like it or not.
