To heal a nation haunted by trauma

Q : Archbishop J, how do we chart a way forward for T&T?

The solution to every challenge begins with recognising the challenge. In T&T, too often, our first response to a challenge is to assume the solution is somewhere outside of us. Many need to be held accountable for their actions. But each of us has a part to play in the solution.

Albert Einstein has famously said: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” So, the second thing we need to do is to understand the level of consciousness that created the problem.

Let us listen again to the challenge from George Lamming in his Coming, Coming Home:

I do not think there has been anything in human history quite like the meeting of Africa, Asia, and Europe in this American archipelago we call the Caribbean. But it is so recent since we assumed responsibility for our own destiny, that the antagonistic weight of the past is felt as an inhibiting menace. And that is the most urgent task and the greatest intellectual challenge: how to control the burden of this history and incorporate it into our collective sense of the future (Lamming 25,1995).

Bearing the burden of this history, we are faced today with the urgent task of mapping out a collective sense of our future. In every area of public life, we are struggling with this challenge.

In government, in all the utilities, the churches, education, crime, corruption, health care, road maintenance, in conducting regular business we are struggling with serving the people and the nation in a meaningful way that creates a sense of a collective future.

Lloyd Best said we are ‘unresponsible’—that is incapable of taking responsibility. Terrence Farrell says: “We like it so”, pointing to the cultural root of our underachievement. Naipaul would say we are a picaroon society.

What if we arrived at another level of consciousness so we could better understand the menace of our history and find a collective way forward.

Trauma

Many studies on the impact of trauma on individuals and nations have been done. I have been wondering if an understanding of trauma may provide us with a better perspective to look at our current state.

Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) gives us a working definition:

Trauma is the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. Experiencing a traumatic event can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. Long after the traumatic event occurs, people with trauma can often feel shame, helplessness, powerlessness, and intense fear (camh.ca).

We tend to have a fear of labels. We also suspect that by using a psychological diagnosis we are letting people off the hook. Let us look at trauma at the micro level first.

Our recent spate of school violence has been alarming, to say the least. Have we enquired deeply enough to understand the real challenge? If we attempt to regulate this violence by external controls—the police, the threat of severe consequences, or use of power—the behaviour may be curtailed briefly, but these controls do not address the root of the problem.

Many children have spent the last two years at home with little socialising among friends, with little supervision, in houses that are not spacious, where family members get into each other’s face constantly, and lacking money because parents are not working. This experience could not have been a very good one.

One young man, who was deemed a troublemaker at school, spoke about his home as difficult. When I pressed him, he said: “My father does drink. Then he does beat me.”

This child, I would propose, is not a troublemaker. He is traumatised. The trouble is the symptom of the ailment, not a definition of the child.

At the risk of being an armchair psychologist, I believe we should be enquiring whether this child is suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Trauma haunts us in so many ways. It stays with us, stored in our bodies. It produces irrational behaviours that we could misinterpret.

If a child is a troublemaker, we seek to apply the rod of discipline, in any way we can, to ensure the child conforms with what is appropriate social behaviour. If, however, a child is suffering from PTSD, we need to heal the trauma at the root and find a way to reconnect the brain of this child to focus and regain impulse control.

I found the young man perceptive and engaged; he wanted to connect and be validated. If the adults around him apply severe penalties and discipline, without seeking to understand and heal the trauma, he will leave school and become a major challenge for society.

Most gang leaders that I have met and worked with had serious learning challenges. They were disciplined rather than diagnosed. They were punished rather than educated. They emerged to torment the village and the nation.

Trauma and the Nation

Rachel Yehuda, in an article in Scientific American, July 2022, proposes that trauma is transmitted to children.

After the attack on the World Trade Centre 2001, she evaluated 187 pregnant women. She found: “Many were in shock, and a colleague asked if I could help diagnose and monitor them. They were at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD—experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness, or other psychiatric symptoms for years afterward.”

Many of the mothers had developed PTSD and this was confirmed by the “low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol.” But the impact on the babies was not anticipated at all. Yehuda says:

Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier, a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma leaves a trace in offspring even before they are born.

She went on to do more tests on children of Holocaust survivors and on people who suffered abuse and their children, others diagnosed with PTSD and their children. The conclusion: “Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways.”

When you consider the events of slavery and the trauma it inflicted on millions of Africans for over 200 years, we need to ask about the role of trauma in our post-colonial society. Indian Indentureship had its own traumatic experiences.

If we fail to recognise our challenge and continue to misdiagnose our youth, we will be applying the wrong solutions and so adding to the burden of the past, rather than healing it and finding a pathway to a better collective sense of our future.

Key Message:

Finding the right diagnosis is vital to helping T&T find a pathway to development. Trauma may be an important paradigm to view the learned helplessness that seems to plague us.

Action Step:

Reflect more deeply on the paradigm you use to diagnose those around you. Is it adequate?

Scripture Reading:

Luke 6:35–38