Reclaiming Lost Power
Therapy, Justice, and Going Beyond Victim-Blaming
Content Warning: Violence, Racism
Let’s say that your family is descended from slaves, people literally and legally categorized as subhuman. Not only were your ancestors completely prevented from working to accumulate resources, they were treated as resources in and of themselves. Let’s say that after being released from slavery and starting from scratch your ancestors were run out of town every ten years or so by White mobs, only able to accumulate what they could carry away in their hands. Let’s say that the men in your family beat the women and children in your family because they thought they had to be hard and strong to maintain order, seeing themselves as leading a group of people stranded in a hostile and violent land. Let’s say that your father got into drugs as a young man, as many do, experiencing them as a profound relief and release from the terrible pressures that pushed him around both at home and in the broader world. Let’s say that one day a police officer decided to pull him over because he “looked suspicious”, called for a search of his vehicle because the officer “smelled marijuana”, and found some pot in your father’s bag - even though he hadn’t been smoking any that day. Let’s say that the prosecutor took one look at your father and decided to threaten him with a ton of charges that would put him away for a long time or at least be extremely expensive to fight, so your father takes the plea deal and winds up going to prison. There he is treated with violent cruelty by both the other inmates and even the guards, which society seems to accept as being a normal part of the punishment.
Before he got in trouble, and without knowing it, he’d gotten your mother pregnant. She kept the baby. When he was released from prison he found you and your mother and your parents decided to try to be a family, and so they got married. You were already walking and talking and he didn’t want to miss any more of you growing up.
But it was hard. Your father found that, as a Convicted Felon, society did not want him back. People had a legal and acceptable way to discriminate against him, and they did. What jobs he could get seemed to take unfair advantage of him, and he didn’t seem to last long, and quite a few employers told him exactly what they thought he was when they fired him. Eventually, out of desperation and familiarity, he called up people he’d met in prison who said he could make money moving drugs for them, and so he did.
Strange people started coming by your family’s home. Your father began keeping odd hours, leaving the apartment for long stretches of time at all hours of the day. One of those days he came back with a gun. One of those days he came back at dawn with a shattered windshield spattered with blood, and your mother confronted him about it and he started yelling at her and she started yelling at him and he threw her to the ground right there in front of you and pulled out his gun, and you lept up and ran to your mother and put yourself in between her and the gun, both you and your mother crying and pleading up at your father as his glazed and bloodshot eyes darted without blinking back and forth from one of you to the other, the gun quivering more and more until he shut his eyes tight and screamed as he put the gun in his mouth and fired.
How would you help someone who went through something like this?
The climactic traumatic event above occurred in the context of an individual family, and the effects will be endured by the individuals who survived the encounter. The family and the individuals in it were themselves situated in a social system that worked to deprive and dehumanize them. At what level - the family and its individuals, or the society - should we work to create a solution?
What I want to assert is “both”, and I want to assert that against people who claim the true solutions can be found at only one of those levels.
On the political right, you’ll often find an ethos of “you are the only person who can be responsible for the quality of your life, and you need to get your own life in order before you tell anyone else how to live theirs”. On the political left, you’ll often find an ethos of “your life is primarily determined by systemic social forces that are beyond your individual control, and the only way to create meaningful change is to organize to create change at the social-system level. Seeking individual empowerment at-best allows systemic problems to continue and at-worst is gaslighting and victim-blaming.”
If there were a core story common to all narratives of growth, it would include some stage of “a problem that seemed insurmountable suddenly seemed like it was within my power to solve”. This can occur both at the scale of an individual life (i.e. problems with self-image or friction in relationships) or at the scale of a society (a problem that seemed to be “natural” is shown to be a human invention that can be reformed or replaced). To say “there is a solution, and I can be responsible for enacting it” is not to say “I am to blame for the existence of the problem” - it’s not to put the blame on the person(s) impacted by the problem, it’s to give the person(s) a reclamation of lost power.
In the situation above, there would be a lot of power to reclaim at the level of the family and the individual, and to exclude that power would be to the detriment of the impacted parties. There is work that could be done to help process the feelings and trauma-responses the situation left in its wake, work that would be necessary even if an overnight worldwide revolution guaranteed that such a scenario would never happen to anybody again. Taking care of one’s feelings and stories about one’s self can go a long way towards helping an individual contribute to social change, and can be a key part of how one sets out to do good in the world.
That said, the scenario I described above was a spectacular one-off traumatic event, but a lot of the pain of systemic injustice is inflicted regularly and relentlessly. Teaching coping skills and personal empowerment can be effective, but will be limited in their effectiveness as long as the disempowering situations continue to persist. It’s difficult to heal when your wounds keep getting reopened.
There are a lot of problems that can only be solved at the systemic level, but not all of the problems are there. As we fight for a better world it’s critically important that no amount of pain winds up getting left behind