The trauma responses of women and the burden of existence
It’s only the human species that questions and even has the ability to question its existence as they exist. Focusing on the role of women in examining and experience their existence in the past, present, and questioning the futures.
The gripping narrative of power is damaging, and more so today. Ever since the Afghan tragedy has unfolded itself, it feels unnervingly triggering. The locus of control for the entire state and its affairs go in the hands of a group of people who believe and impose the ideal that women are not equal to men. They are perpetrators of crimes against women, with sexual slavery as only the beginning of it all.
Unfortunately, they’re not the only group that tend towards this. While reading a report from the WHO about women’s health, I came across the fact that rape during war is considered a collateral damage during wars, but not as one of the results of war. It is systematic genocide, with generational cycles of trauma within the psychosomatic consequences. In the last few years there have been plenty of civil wars across countries. But is at a loss? The losses only become only a collateral damage of a war that was started by men in power, and won by men in power, while both sides lost the basic human rights that their women and children deserved, as they’re all victims and survivors of rape and systematic abuse — but who are they really? Only collateral damage.
Let’s take the case of the most recent judgement passed by the Chattisgarh court in India (August, 2021) — ‘Sexual Act By Husband Not Rape, Even By Force’. The problematic view is that once you’ve married someone, it’s a life-long consent to everything that happens within the bedroom, outside the bedroom, in the family life — everything. Let’s keep law on one side, it’s a hypocritical affair, as the women’s family would always ask her to ‘adjust’ and ‘compromise’ to their fate. The doors are shut, never to be revoked for support. But before marrying a stranger, you’re not allowed to even engage with men as you’d bring ‘shame’ to your family, the same one that will abandon you after they marry you off and ‘send you off’ to live with a stranger, and his family to be an unpaid labour for the rest of your life. At its core who is advantaged the most by the conventional marriage systems? What is your existence reduced to? Who are you? A collateral damage of the society’s way of functioning.
Let’s take another instance that acquits a 21-year old Rape convict who raped someone at a premier institution of the country as a student. The Gauhati High court acquits him on the lines that he is a ‘future asset to the state’s development’ because both him and the woman are a part of technical courses at the institution. However the justice system in the country gave a very clear message to both of them — they have plainly conveyed that the man at a position of privilege and power can get away with whatever without any consequences as long as they’re an asset, and the women need to abide by, comply, and move on to work in such toxic, crashing, traumatic environments. What happens to the woman here? What about the mental, emotional, physical and psychosomatic trauma she faced? It’s all just a collateral damage, isn’t it?
Now that’s what women’s struggles become, ‘collateral damage’ — ain’t it?
Maybe to your taste, these were some very strong but singular examples of traumatic experiences that are not looked at or seen. Let’s take a case that women around the world will go through, and have gone through or are going through. The biological structure of life. Bodies endure pain every month with the uterus shedding itself down as a reminder of no offspring. And what when there’s an offspring-?
Even in the most developed of societies, it is seen as an obvious duty but not a choice. Childbirth is seen as the actualisation of experiencing womanhood, because a woman’s existence is only validated when she bears and raises a child, no matter how cruel, undignified the circumstances. 95% of women in developing countries don’t receive a healthy, hygienic environment during their pregnancy. Pregnancy is also a complicated time, from conception to carrying, it involves a lot of risk — the agency of the woman in question is also negligible, with no or limited access to contraceptives, the need to hide any contraception use, no agency of whether she wants to have sex and in what manner, no agency in financial decisions, no agency in social decision and household chores — she’s ultimately bound to it all. There’s postpartum depression that is also looked at as a collateral damage to the ‘beautiful experience of child birth’
Then come plenty of children born to a family that will not have the emotional, physical and financial resources to cater to the children. The mother with all her subconscious traumas will pass on the conditioning, while the rest of the family will ensure that the structure of society and ‘patriarchy’ is maintained, and we have a never ending cycle of trauma for women and power in the hands of men.
I know what you’d say, times are changing, men are ‘helping’ and ‘allowing’ women for chores and working outside of the home. And why I ask does a man and his family has to allow the woman to work and fend for the house and care for the child — the money is finally coming to the man in the house with an added label of ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ to the man’s family, while the women are doing not only paid labour outside the house but unpaid labour inside it.
When you bring it up, the answer becomes — choice. Choice? But no one can see the emotional labour and exhaustion behind this — well that’s collateral damage again?
When the entire system is stacked against you, from where does one get the power to exist?
There is always power, control, and monopoly which is asserted by smaller and larger structures of the society. These power structures need to be questioned, but with added layers to the narrative of outrage. Yes, we need to call out on the perpetrators, yes there’s a need to fix something that is so absolutely unnerving to our very existence — there’s that outrage. Outrage is a powerful emotion, it also stems from a place of repression.
Repression is painfully based in trauma.
Women across the globe carry trauma — biological, psychological, emotional, physiological, physical, mental and phenomenal trauma. Trauma makes you go into survival mode. And, from a psychological standpoint it all points at the responses of trauma — the flight, fight, fawn, freeze modes.
It’s sad when people ask rape survivors why they didn’t speak up when it happened? Or when people ask women who are outraged to stop being overdramatic? Or when people try to shut women into spaces that are bounded by convention?
There’s a reason why there is a justified outrage, and repression across the world. It is manifesting into the four trauma responses of flight, fight, fawn and freeze. Let’s find out what these mean within the paradigm of collective systemic oppression. When we start operating from a place of survival, we respond with these responses.
The fight response is when the parts of us that love us the most, our anger takes a front a seat and shows outrage, demands the rights. Years of generational repression turns into an always trigger mode. This is when we fantasise about an alternative universe and an opposite power dynamic.
The flight response is when we want to flee the situation. We fill our mind too much with the everyday, to escape the cruel reminder of our traumas. We will our work with responsibilities and chores and we’re made to believe we’re supposed to. Have you noticed it in women around you?
The freeze response is when you stop associating your body with yourself. This is like a brain fog that detaches you from people in life, and the body almost goes into a sense of isolation. Heard of times when people ask rape survivors why they didn’t speak up at the time? Because their bodies when into survival mode, dissociating and avoiding contact — feeling trapped!
The fawn response is when to survive you comply, and let the conventions be followed as they are. You please the people around you to ensure you can survive and stay. Taking a situation of any household in India, and looking at the middle class generation with women aged 45–55, have you observed a tendency where they can’t say no? where they keep mum and do it all? when everything becomes their responsibility and they go above and beyond to please everyone of their existence?
I know trauma isn’t limited to women, and neither are the responses. But the systemic oppression on the gender has been of a kind — now in solidarity and togetherness all carriers of deep trauma with negligible psychological and emotional support. Instead, after all this women are the caregivers — and rightfully so, since there is space for deep empathy. But that’s not something to be normalised and expected of, rather there needs to be a safer space where one can breathe and stay alive to live and not just survive.
Discussing gender issues and topical feminist culture is one of my core purposes in life. If this interests you, drop me a line on the comments and share with like-minded people. Let’s build a more equitable society.
