Holding it together when things fall apart

I watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over my morning coffee on 2 February as she shared her experience of being in Congress on 6 January, and how this shapes her call for accountability.

Her experience of being in Congress that day triggered, in her, a previous trauma of sexual assault. I was fully drawn into this testimony that was both personal yet determinately political, disregarding my typical radio news analysis and making me late to shower.

I wanted to ask her how she was feeling, the day after the night before. Instead, I was left pondering scatters of thoughts and feelings. Some I u-turned on, others I parked for another time.

As the day went on my thoughts came to circulate around the issue of trauma-triggers in politics. This is something I think about a lot. It is something I have had to think about a lot.

While it took an extreme event to create a similar situational context to that of her previous trauma, nothing else about her testimony was a shock or a surprise to me. It was not the first time I have listened to a politician share how the political context re-triggered a previous trauma.

What certainly was unique was her self-awareness. Her reaction to that experience was far less severe than a similar re-triggering experience for other politicians I know. And yet, I thought, she did share her assault with the world. That is quite extreme, and extremely courageous.  

Again, I wondered how she was feeling, the day after the night before.  

Trauma-triggering-trauma in politics

While the events of that day were extreme, and it is incredible that this was Alexandria’s place of work let alone a democratic shrine, it does not take an extreme event for a trauma to be re-triggered.

It simply takes an individual to feel similarly unable to integrate a situation into reality. The closer the situation resonates with the smells, sounds, sensations (stress, anxiety, fear) of the original trauma the more likely it will trigger.

So, there is almost no point in asking what it is about politics that makes politicians re-experience trauma. The answer is: potentially everything.

Yet, it does not help that politics is a frontline. Politicians are constantly exposed to interactions that are not easy to normalise. Whatever a politician says, and whatever a politician does, exposes them to verbal and physical attack.

But whether they experience their lifeworld as a frontline is subjective. Many experience politics as a playground while many experience it as an assault course, and most will experience it as a bit of both. Almost all try to make it a playground experience by shrugging off or eventually numbing to the social media virile, as one small facet of the assault course.

What can we do?

In this reality the solution lies in the politician’s ability to handle the triggers and their reactions to the triggers.

At the heart of this process for anyone who has experienced trauma, and its aftermath, is the question: what holds us together when things fall apart?

The rest of my day was spent pondering the aspects of the political experience that cultivate presence and feeling centred, as a potential pathway out of the cycle of trauma-triggering-trauma in politics. 

I then realised that, like all emotional experiences, even these are subjective. So, the space is open for us each to identify those pockets of normality and call on them when things feel, suddenly and acutely, incomprehensible.