They are addicts. Stop. We are all substance users.

Vancouver is a city on edge. 

On the edge of the wild, the urban and water; the haves and have-nots; the edge between dereliction and gentrification; it pushes environmental movements, it was where Greenpeace was established, while edging Alberta, a province big on natural resource extraction and building pipelines into BC; it’s been on the edge of drug crises for years. Right now, it is in the midst’s of an opioid crisis; It edges the USA. Washington States’ Cascade mountain range can be seen from Vancouver, and the state’s Olympic Mountains from Victoria, Vancouver Island. The jagged edges of these fortress-like ranges are visible to all Canadians from these ‘safe’, Canadian vantage points.

When we all walk into a bar…

The many contrasts laid bare across the Vancouver landscape attracts interesting critique, which pushes the public policy discourse, and seems to allow Vancouver to push the edge of working practices in the social service sector. Of course, this attracts big thinkers. I met with a few of them – all questioning what our society is: how we’ve got here? Where we want to go? And what’s to come, given what we’ve already done?

I spoke to several writers. All of them have an understanding and critique on trauma and addictions. As well as deep thinkers, they are all practitioners in their fields. One a psychologist, a sociologist and a physician, amongst others. Apparently, there is a bad joke in that…

I went to a social innovations event, titled, “five [insert: various practitioners] walk into a bar and…’.

It was designed to encourage interdisciplinary thinking across and beyond the social service sector. The premise being that innovation is possible when we collaborate, and stop segregating and dismantling our thoughts and work into silos which discombobulate people and communities, forming a lot of unnecessary edges in both our work and social interactions. Edges which obscure real and productive relationships, edges which produce opposition and conflict.

In With Forward, are the newly established group who ran the event. Here’s a link to their website.

In With Forward

They are discussing turning social safety nets into trampolines! They are asking what methods, techniques and strategies need to be employed to empower people to launch themselves into a life they want and deserve.

They got us to question our working models and approaches and assess whether they build the capacities and strengths of the people we work with. We were encouraged to consider how we can change our behaviours so we can recognise and respond to what people want in their lives. When we’re honest with ourselves, we know we all impose an expectation of what we think should happen to people. How much time do we really spend listening to what people want and exposing people to the opportunities they deserve? In With Forward suggest that all our work should be centred around this approach.

On my last night, I heard Naomi Klein speak in Downtown Vancouver. She read from her new book, ‘No is not enough’. Here is a link to a review from a Vancouver paper.

The Church of Naomi Klein

I would encourage you to read it, even if you’re not a fan. It is a shortish call to action for all those left in a state of shock after Trump, Brexit, and all manifestations of the alt-right, which is a direct product of neoliberalism. So, if you are seriously considering, what now, if anything at all but survival, and what exists beyond the neoliberal – read it.

She talks of a different economy, a different society of strong supporting communities and people, who can regain their power and control through civil institutions grounded in safeguarding rights of humanity, redistribution of wealth, and a real and strong safety net. Her words made me think, if we jump to pulling the net taught too soon, are we left with holes for people to fall through, while others half-heartedly jump on a broken spring?

dereliction right beside gentrification

I am sure there are ways of repairing the safety net while pulling it into a trampoline at the same time. What’s important to know is that people are considering how to do this. There is a rising consensus that patterns must be broken and paradigms must change. The big thinkers I met, spoke intensely about this. They did acknowledge that to do this our systems would have to shift dramatically and rapidly, otherwise, things are going to get a whole lot worse.

The thought of the big thinkers

Overall, everyone I met thought similarly. But, it is important to note that there are controversies over the use of the word trauma. Some said they wouldn’t use it because it creates labels and pathologises individuals. While others said Trauma, is the big message! We must accept that it is here, it is huge, people are suffering and we have to do something about it.

links to the books of those I met with 

gender unchained

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

The Globalisation of Addiction

In this post, I will continue to use the word trauma. Everyone I talked to, spoke of addictions and harms as being caused by historical socio-political systems. To understand the big thoughts I believe there has to be a unifying word... Trauma is a way of explaining the universal nature of these harms, and simultaneously affords us a political analysis of how harms result and become entrenched in and across societies, and, with the brain science of neuroplasticity, we know trauma can be transformed.
   

Although this fundamental difference existed, along with variations in how we should be addressing trauma, there was a common beginning to the analysis of harm shared by all those I met with. I fear it is more complex than what I am about to convey, but I’m giving it a go. 

In the following, to stay true to those I met who did not use the word trauma, swap trauma for dislocation, or displacement, and the premise would remain the same. I believe that dislocation and displacement are processes like trauma, as in both have an effect to disrupt or destroy a sense of positive belonging, connection, identity and attachment to people and place.

Here is the thinking:

Everyone, no one is excluded, is a part of, and a reproducer of, globalisation. We all belong to a global system that has many positive connections across all cultures and societies but absolutely continues to produce inequality, subjugation and discrimination, and trauma, on many levels. This is because our societies have been increasingly dominated by freedom of the market, serving to erode public spaces and replacing them with the private sphere of capital ownership and monetary exchange. This means that whether we believe it or not we are either traumatised and experience the consequences of trauma, and/or we are implicated within systems causing trauma. What’s more, we have been a part of it for generations. We are as much a part of intergenerational trauma as any community that we have labelled and categorised as being affected by intergenerational trauma. It is us, our society, and our history that puts us all where we are today. 

Are we really, all addicted?

If you are questioning whether this is true or not, one theorist I met with said our society is built on addiction. Do you tend to look at your phone too much and crumble when it breaks? I do. Do your kids ask you for the latest game/toy/technological advice all the time because of advertisements and infectious desires of watching other kids with toys? Do you get into gas guzzling cars every day that are in the process of destroying the world? This is not to make us feel guilty. It is to make us realise that we all live within a system fuelling harmful activities which are highly addictive. And it is to make us question, why do we do it, and are there things we can change, both on the individual and societal scale?    

I also met with several harm reduction organisations while in Vancouver, working with women who are street living and drinking and taking drugs, often during their pregnancy. It was impressed on me that these women are substance users, just like we all are. Addiction does not define them, it is not who they are, it is something that has happened to them.

the importance of attachment between Mother and Baby no matter what

We are all wonderful mothers when given the support and opportunities

When we consider people as substance users we can talk to them about their behaviours, what is harmful and what is beneficial. When we talk to people as addicts, who must change their behaviours to fit our social norms, we trap them. We trap them within stigmatising safety nets and our expectations of who they should be.

When we go even further and consider that we are all substance users we may begin to consider our own harmful behaviours and everything we do as being interconnected with all substance users.   

It helps us to see that addictions do not occur in isolation. We start to see trauma as the systemic cause, coming from our global systems. 

Global Trauma

If we are all experiencing trauma to one degree or another it means that none of us is free of it. Contrary to first reading this doesn’t have to be a depressing analysis. The analysis is entirely non- exclusionary. It means that we all take responsibility and need to account for the effects of a system on each other. Which means, with a greater self-awareness, a more astute political understanding and an inquiry that seeks true news, we can change the systems that we live within.

Are we all a part of this picture? A scene from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

What’s more, if we do believe that we sit with trauma, anxiety and stress, we might take the time to learn how to regulate. I’ve written about regulation in previous blogs. It means that we all need to do self-work, not just to manage our behaviours and learn how to justify our moods (a western preoccupation of psychoanalysis), but to let go of our behaviours and expectations, which not only belittle and shame others but create anxiety in ourselves when expectations are not met.

The manager of a centre I went to said, the problem is not that we see a universal humanity, the problem is that our systems apply a universal expectation across vastly different contexts. She said our brains respond to stimuli, in the same way, we as human beings are the same. What is different is our environments. We have got to drop expectations but work with the same degree of humanity wherever we are.

This enables us to see people, to see each other for who we are, and the context which we live within. It drops the labels and blurs those edges which have separated us based on supposed differences and has hidden our commonalities. When we see people as human, not marked, labelled, categorised or stigmatised, the chance for an honest and transparent conversation opens. A conversation about how trauma can be transformed from a stigma securing us in an inescapable net within an unshakable oppressive system to empowerment. A system where empowerment is the preoccupation of all civic institutions working to launch all people into the life we want to live, from a net that will always help us rebound when we fall. 

What next? Meditate and then move on

Meditation is a step. Meditation is not the answer, so went the thinking of one author I met with. It is good to meditate, it can relax you, regulate your mind and help you think more clearly. However, the next step is certainly not to disengage and focus on your own breathing. It is to re-engage and appreciate the system we all live and breathe within so we can alter it for the better.

We live in a world that is many things at once - Industrial and Idyllic and part of a much bigger system 

When we meditate or ground ourselves (these are processes that have the same effect as meditation – dancing, swimming, walking, shouting on top of a mountain…) we can engage in reasonable and rational conversations about how to shift paradigms and confront and overcome injustice. It is hard to have these discussions, to work through issues when we are not regulated. Consider meetings you’ve been in that you sit fuming, tensions escalate, people snap and what we need to work through is never broached. Could this be most our meetings and encounters? Again, I was told quite bluntly that Trump and Clinton and everyone in American politics is traumatised!

What trauma informed practice allows us to do is regulate, and then engage in confronting discussions that no longer trigger us (because we are regulated) but help us move forward, together, productively. Trauma-informed practice should lead to empowerment. Which should mean a rising of voices from the ground that are more informed at determining what aspects of the system need to change because they have literally been at the receiving end of it.

Prophecies

Naomi Klein gave her reading in a church in Downtown Vancouver. I don’t think she was signalling the era of a new religious faith, although there were over a thousand of her devotee’s present. 

Looks like my brother and I are preaching at the alter!

I think, she, like others, believe that we need to be elevated to a higher thought. We need some way of believing that we can think outside of crisis and imagine a different and possible reality.

In the word of one theorist, we need to be transcendental. Focusing on religion and spirituality can help us appreciate that people, across time and space, know a thing or two about transcendence. He was not advocating for us to be religious, he was saying that it is very possible to overcome the now.

It is this visionary thought and a commitment/investment in vision that will enable us to transcend the current moment of global political crisis. What this looks like? I don’t know.

We’ve actually got to do it. We need to come together more effectively and talk in transcendent tones to enable it to happen. To start blurring the edges and permeating the boundaries of unnecessary and unproductive borders, for this new reality to emerge.