We’re Failing Trauma Survivors, But Maybe We Can Do Better
[TW for discussion of trauma, including child abuse/neglect and domestic violence, as well as discussions of outcomes of said trauma, including mental illness, chronic/terminal illness, addiction, violence, etc.]
In any given day, I encounter at least a half-dozen posts on tumblr in which people in crisis are asking for help to get to better places. A lot of these people are also dealing with trauma, and resulting mental illness, chronic illness, poverty, and homelessness.
I’ve been one of these people! There’s a reason I’m not living with my parents anymore, and it’s because of the kindness of strangers on the Internet — sending money, sending new socks, sending offers for housing, etc.
There are a lot of reasons people might ask for donations: some people are unable to work, whether it be via disability, workplace discrimination, lack of job opportunities, or being unable to meet educational prerequisites for a job. Some people are able to work, but still can’t make ends meet on minimum wage. Some people have urgent or acute expenses — medical bills, housing bills, etc — that they aren’t able to meet without outside help.
Independence is a myth.
A lot of people are in the camp that if people want to improve their lives, they have to do it alone, they have to work independently towards it, they shouldn’t be asking for any help. Sometimes, this isn’t possible. Arguably, it isn’t possible for anyone, at all.
Think about it: As humans, we’re very interdependent. Independence is kind of a myth: Is anyone truly 100% self-sufficient? Even people who have jobs have bosses, who they depend on for employment. Usually those bosses have bosses, too, and then they have employees they depend on to keep their ship running, so to speak. Then you’ve got the barista at the coffee shop who makes your coffee every morning, you’ve got the bus driver who helps you get to work, you’ve got the cashiers at the supermarket (or the self-checkout machines, which, in turn, were created and are managed by — you guessed it — people).
When you’re feeling sad, you don’t just magically make yourself feel better. You listen to music, or binge-watch Netflix, or cry over some ice cream, or call your friend on the phone, or have your partner come over to hold you for a bit, or call your therapist to make an appointment…you see where I’m going with this, right?
We’re not independent. The “independent adult” thing is a myth. By our very nature, we depend on each other to survive.
But, I guess, let’s just pretend for a moment that this independence thing isn’t extremely dissectible.
Let’s pretend that the “independent adult” thing is a valid argument, like everyone wants it to be. Let’s pretend, just for a second, that independence is our End Goal.
Why, then, is it harder for some people — specifically trauma survivors and marginalized people (who, often, are more likely to be exposed to trauma) — to achieve independence?
Yeah, I know, people who can’t get a job, or can’t keep a job, or need therapy, or whatever, just aren’t trying hard enough. It’s super easy to get a job, right? All you need is…well, for entry-level jobs, usually a GED or high school diploma; the more specialized a job gets, the more education and/or experience you need.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, education isn’t accessible, or has to be pushed to the side for other things, like trying to keep oneself afloat by getting a job.
I have a few ACEs up my sleeve, and they all suck.
There’s a thing called the ACE Study, or the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. The original study was conducted by Kaiser Permanente in 1995. In essence, the ACE Study focused on certain adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) which are related to risk factors for disease and general poor well-being throughout the lifespan.
The questionnaire, which you can access here, consists of ten questions concerning childhood experiences which can be classified as traumatic. These questions relate to physical abuse, verbal abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Half of the questions relate to personal trauma (being the recipient of the abuse/neglect, such as being beaten), and the other half relate to trauma experienced or witnessed via other people (being the observer, such as watching a parent abuse another parent or child).
The ACE Study revealed a link between childhood trauma and later health problems and social problems — including heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, depression, violence (both as victim and as perpetrator), and suicide. The ACE Study also revealed that childhood trauma is much more common than a lot of us want to believe.
As a person’s ACE score rises, so do their risk factors for a myriad of issues: addiction, chronic illness, mental illness, poor academic achievement, poverty or financial issues, and suicide being among them.
“Incidents of abuse are never stand-alone events. And for each additional adverse experience reported, the toll in later damage increases.”
-Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
For the record, I’ll state that my personal ACE score is 6. I won’t specify which questions I answered “yes” to. I’ll also state that I’ve been chronically transient and financially unstable for as long as I’ve been an adult (roughly three years), and it’s all been directly related to my PTSD — just for some perspective on the whole “trauma wrecks you pretty hard long after it’s ‘over’” thing.
So how does this factor into people asking for donations on the internet?
The short answer is: pretty damn easily!
The longer answer is: if you consider that a lot of people who ask for donations on the internet have backstories rife with trauma and instability, and the donations generally surround things like: escaping abusive situations, paying medical bills, paying for school, etc…it seems kind of obvious.
Trauma doesn’t stop at the “end” of the incident. If you drop a marble into a pool of water, it doesn’t just plop in there — the water around it ripples, sometimes with a splash at the beginning. Much like the little ripples in the water, the aftereffects of trauma continue long after the trauma occurs.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say a six-year-old witnesses his parents having violent physical fights every night. Let’s then say that his parents divorce. Well, first off, this puts that kid at an ACE score of 2.
This hypothetical kid might be pretty on-edge for a long time. Hemight start to suffer in school, even if he’d been doing well before. He might turn to self-harming behaviors to cope. Later on, he might turn to substances to cope.
Let’s say the kid’s remaining parent — the one who didn’t leave — has trouble keeping down a job. The kid might take on a part-time job after school to help, or he might drop out of high school altogether to work full-time at a fast food place down the street from his home. Since this kid didn’t get a high school diploma, he’ll have a hard time getting jobs that aren’t, for example, foodservice. He’ll also have a hard time getting into college unless he secures a diploma or GED first — and that’s not factoring in the money and time that would cost him.
You could argue, well it’s just one kid.
But it’s not.
This is about more than 20-somethings asking for donations online.
This is about your friends and loved ones— your classmates, your former classmates, your neighbors, your coworkers, your barista at Starbucks, your siblings, your cousins, your friends’ kids, your own kids… chances are, you know someone (maybe even yourself) who would have an ACE score higher than 2.
This is about childhood trauma being pervasive whether we like it or not.
I know we all like to think that, oh, it’s not happening to anyone I know, it didn’t happen to me, it won’t happen to me, it won’t happen to my kids…but that’s pretty flawed logic. It’s kind of like saying no one you know drinks whole milk or has drank whole milk. You probably know someone who drinks or has drank whole milk, and, chances are, you probably know someone — maybe more than one someone — who was traumatized in some way as a child, or is being traumatized.
I’m not saying you have to give your last dollar to that kid on tumblr who needs help paying their bills or getting out of a shitty spot — though, if you do have a few dozen dollars to spare, it’d be pretty cool if you’d give maybe a few of those.
What I’m saying is: be more compassionate. Think before you tell this stranger on the internet who may or may not be a minor to “get a job!”, or, worse, to hurt themselves (yes, this happens on the regular, and has happened to me before).
Also, maybe, consider what you can do today to minimize the trauma of others: donating to organizations that help traumatized folks (like homeless shelters, youth outreach programs, food pantries, etc), letting that sad stranger on the park bench cry out their life story to you, resolving to be more patient with your kid, calling up a friend who’s struggling, sending a nice message to someone on social media… you’ve got options.
If we want to stop seeing people on social media asking for help with money, housing, etc (hopefully, our reasoning is “this shitty stuff shouldn’t be happening” over “I’m sick of people asking for free lunch”), we need to consider what we can do to prevent these outcomes. We need to consider what we can do to raise kids who aren’t traumatized, and what we can do to avoid being the ones to traumatize them ourselves. We need to consider how we, as interdependent beings, can help each other achieve stability and realize our potential.
Trauma won’t stop today, probably. It probably won’t stop tomorrow, either. But maybe we can lessen the blow of it on someone in our lives. And, perhaps this is super-wishful thinking, but maybe we can work towards eventually erasing it altogether.
In closing, I will — not for the first time this week — quote van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score:
“Trauma is now our most urgent public health issue, and we have the knowledge necessary to respond effectively. The choice is ours to act on what we know.”
