Heirlooms and Accessories: Owning Your Self

“Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself, […]. The challenge of recover is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind — of your self.”

• Bessel van der Kolk

This week at Heirlooms and Accessories we discussed Bessel van der Kolk’s chapter, Healing from Trauma: Owning Your Self. We mostly began our conversation in silence with intermittent thoughts thrown in, here or there, not entirely cohesive. This is a familiar topic for us as students in a counseling psychology program where we are not averse to hours of contemplating trauma, theoretically or practically. Amidst the thoughts being tossed out casually on the table I was having trouble locating my mind. It felt like the drive of a daily commute, familiar territory that allows me to check out.

Suddenly, I had a clear moment in this discussion where I was struck by the very title of the group I had chosen for this semester. My mind sparked looking for a connection between the reading, our discussion and the work that we had been doing in African American Liberation Theology all term. The title of the chapter now landed in my hands like a heavy bricks, where before I thought I was holding feathers.

“Being owned is theoretical. Being owned means that something is influencing me. My mind or body may do something that I don’t want to do. I can just take the metaphorical reigns of my life and own myself again.” -My mind on self-ownership.

“Being owned is being property. Being owned is being bought and sold. Being forced into actions directly against your will. Being owned is not being fully human. Being owned is being 3/5ths of a human.” -The not-so-distant-past African American reality.

There is the connection that I was looking for, even if I don’t know what to do with it. What does it look like to pursue self-ownership when your collective and intergenerational trauma is rooted in being property, being owned by someone else. Self-ownership does not simply come through someone informing you that they no longer own you. The entire society that we inhabit is built on one dominant group literally owning another. The tightly woven fabric of our society assumes the right of one group to hold power over another. It ensures that some bodies still don’t deserve self-ownership

In recent years, there has been a movement amongst black artists toward a reclamation of black bodies and their inherent value and power. As a white man it feels silly and cheap to assume I know anything about this particular movement. I can say how important and necessary I think all of it is. But I am oblivious to the intricacies of what this movement means. What I can speak to with honesty is what I notice in myself as I encounter works of art for black artists, by black artists. I am uncomfortable.

Some of it is pretty clearly from how I have been included in most everything I encounter in my life. Even deeper, though, is the discomfort around a person of color claiming and celebrating their own body. The clearest example of this for me was in one of the most public arenas of art: Beyonce’s super bowl halftime show. Again, I was extremely excited to see the celebration of both blackness and femininity, but lurking beneath the surface I could feel something old that had been buried deep inside me. Part of me wanted to say that this was about black power, and black power is bad. That’s the part of me that still believes self-ownership is not for those who do not look like me. It’s not for those who are not from where I am from.

Pursuing self-ownership in a society that systematically denies it to entire people groups is not only for those negatively impacted by the system. It is necessary for each and every one of us to pursue a space in which all are welcome to self-ownership. We all have to come to a place of facing the parts of ourselves, our families, our communities that believe that we deserve ownership over another. We have to pursue the self-ownership of everyone if we are going to see a society that does not perpetuate and cultivate new oppressions and traumas.