Mental Health, Polyvagal Theory and Collective Liberation

There is this funny edge in modern Western culture where we are all collectively and individually traumatized and then it is the individual’s responsibility to find their way out of the maze of poorly adapted coping mechanisms. Some have it worse, some have it better, but I’m endless ruminating on Kristnamurti’s line: It is not measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

This makes me wonder if anyone out there is not ragged and traumatized. 

This then makes me think of Francis Weller and his five (now six) gates of grief. He writes about how invisible grief is in our culture and that there is more grief then just our most obvious ideas about loss of a loved one. His gates of grief are: everything you love you will lose (loss of a loved one, job, house); the things you expected and did not receive (the things we are biologically wired for: community, safe touch, love); the parts of yourself that did not know love (the parts of us that we hide in shame or fear or self abandonment); the sorrows of the world (literally everything); ancestor grief (intergenerational trauma, the loss of ancestral connection); and the newly added: the harms we committed (white supremacy, racism etc). I’d venture to say this implicates just about everyone into grief and dysfunction. 

This thought brings me to a podcast episode of The Emerald where Josh Shrei talks about ritual trance states as the antidote to trauma and negative emotion. It is the role of the community to help each other because the sickness of the one is the sickness of the whole. If one person was in trouble in traditional cultures it was the onus for the community to make sure that negative energy was moved. This invariable involved fire, dance, drums, chanting, and doing it for hours on end. Trance was not only a way to move energy but it was (and is) a way to bring us into a sense of flow and interconnection. Ever see a murmuration of birds? That is how trance works in a way. The group moves as one and gives the individual a sense of belonging and responsibility to the whole. Instead, today we isolate the individual in therapy, turn the microscope on them and their problems, as if their “problems” can be isolated from the whole of society, as if they are broken and need fixing and everything is their fault. I love therapy and I’m not suggesting we move away form it, but still, let’s think about what we are doing. More on this later on. 

Incidentally, there is also something called battle trance which is how soldiers function in combat. It is essentially responsible for the group mindset that causes people to do horrendous things that they might not otherwise do. People are removed from society and drilled day and night into discipline. They have a singular focus and are encouraged to not think for themselves. The military is a well organized tool for trance state, only instead of worshipping the earth (like our ancestors would have done) this collective energy is being harnessed for violence and hate.

This thought brings me to Polyvagal Theory and the autonomic nervous system. For starters I’ll just say I’m completely obsessed with it. Here is a really quick break down of the theory, and even though you might know some stuff about the nervous system, I’ll give you my take on why it’s fucking amazing. It works like this: there are three branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and they work in a hierarchy. The earliest part of the ANS is the dorsal system. This is our lizard brain which escapes danger by freezing, or, my favorite ways to say it, death feigning. Then there is the sympathy response, fight or flight. This developed a couple of million years after the lizard brain. This is obvious, we either turn and fight danger or run away. Then there is the ventral-vagal system which developed in mammals and is responsible for social engagement, joy, play, and, I would argue, a connection to god. We are constantly moving into between these different states and the flavors of connection or protection they bring. The key is to be able to move between these states with ease and return to ventral state, the place of social engagement which is a feeling of safety. (Unless it doesn’t feel safe to social engage and that is a whole can of worms to untangle, trust me). Not being able to feel safe in social engagement takes a lot of work to move through if you are wired for fear. We need to be able to "immobilize safely," as Stephen Porges writes.

For me this theory is so seminal because of the talk of safety. If we don’t feel safe we aren’t able to engage, play and enjoy life. Polyvagal theory, as related by Deb Dana, is a foundational way to retrain your nervous system into feeling safe and moving out of sympathetic and dorsal mode. It gives a road map back to joy. 

There is one more piece I need to bring into the fold before I connect the dots. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called Dancing in the Streets: The History of Collective Joy. This book should be mandatory reading. The very quick version of it is that Mardi Gras and other kinds of collective celebration used to be common place all across Europe. Ancient peasants had countless days off to parade, play and revel in the streets, significantly more than we do today. Rituals of all kinds ensued in ancient Europe but as the Catholic church came into fashion and power they began to systematically dismantle these festivities little by little (I’m really glossing over a lot here but bare with me, I’m not turning this into a masters thesis). It must have felt like they were banning fun all together, as Ehrenreich glibly notes: no dancing, no singing, no gathering. And this went on for centuries.

Furthermore, as the military took on a new shape in society they forced men to become disciplined in a way that was antithetical to spontaneous joy and fun. By today’s standards we’d say they were training men to become machines. The advent of capitalism was starting to take root which was changing class dynamics as well, and by the 16th century lo and behold, “melancholia” (depression) was beginning to become an epidemic, particularly in the upper classes. Ehrenreich does not make a hard conclusion about this but rather seriously ponders the implication of a loss of collective joy and how class, capitalism, a strict moral code and the military created such an isolated society that serious mental health issues begin to raise.  

Additionally, this was taking place in European culture specifically. The domination that rose over the past several centuries then spread through imperialism all over the globe and it of course playing out dramatically to this day. This level isolation has taken root everywhere, and I'd argue it shows up most explicitly in white culture. In Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone," (which I admit I haven't read yet but I've listened to talks with him), he writes specifically on this issue of isolation in American society. I would add to that that whiteness thrives on exclusivity and that is the arch-nemesis to collective joy, community and interdependence.

So I’ll put this all these pieces together now. I’ve been thinking a lot about mental health recently, particularly because historically my has truly always been awful. As in, I can’t believe I am still alive because I have spent an inordinate amount of time in a suicidal state (I’m doing really good these days!). It’s hard for me not downplay it on some level because if I actually tried to explain how bad my mental health has been it would sound hyperbolic. I've come to understand four things about that state: 1. It wasn't my fault, a lot of cards were stacked against me 2. I was at bonkers levels of autonomic overload, the circuits were just simply fried 3. I was trying to be in control of things I had absolutely no control over. And 4. I didn't know what it felt like to feel safe in or out of relationships so I felt isolated to an extreme, even if I was physically engaging with life (sometimes). Suffice it  to say, my mental health was really, really bad.

But circling back to my opening line of this writing, it’s completely insane that we live in world that isolated us, takes away opportunity and resource for joy, then plucks the individual out of context in order to analyze them under a microscope (therapy), thereby concluding they are “wrong” or broken or bad, and putting the responsibility on them to fix themselves enough to go back to work—or save the planet, or take care of a family, or go shopping, or stop genocide, or make reparations, or be sane, or be creativity enough to feed themselves back into the machine that destroyed their spirits in the first place (if I may be so dramatic…). This is insanity. 

I’m not suggesting personal responsibility is not important. For goodness sake, go to therapy, do your part in eradicating internalized systems of oppression, change, be better, pick up trash, call your representative. But I think it’s important to step back, look at context, and really understand how we got here. And also, take a look at how our poor nervous systems are doing in all this. Cause they ain't doing well on the whole.

I’ve overcome a pretty significant amount of, um, I’ll say baggage, over the years. I know everyone has, I’m not trying to be terminally unique or anything, but I also think I’ve had to climb some pretty steep mental/emotional hurdles that thankfully a lot of people don’t have to. Every time I come to a new plateau I am filled with a lot of gratitude and compassion. A lot of people have a lot of emotional trauma and don’t have the fortitude or resources to do the internal work.. because it fucking sucks and we shouldn’t have to do it alone but by and large people are forced to look for answers without any guidance, hence addiction and other poor coping mechanism are born. Healing a lot like throwing darts in the dark sometimes, desperately trying to find the board that will allow them to live a functional life. I’m in a lot of communities that are that are just that, communities, and I’m around a lot of radical and beautiful people who are upending systems and creating new ones and forging spaces where people do come together for collective liberation and grief and joy. It’s beautiful and amazing. 

But what happens when you’ve been so traumatized that you actually can’t even enter those space safely? What happens when your ventral system, your sense of safety and desire for social engagement, has been so trampled on that the very thing you need (people, connection, trust, safety) is the very thing you are most terrified of? That’s a fucked up catch-22. Trust me. 

For me collective liberation would look like everyone feeling safe enough to be, just be. That of course encompasses physical safety (not being abused or bombed), but also emotional and spiritual safety (being able to tap into your inner expression of god and not fearing for your life, but instead feeling collectively loved). For me the life changing questions have really come down to:

Where do I feel safe?

What does safety feel like in my body?

What can I do to feel more safe in this moment?

These questions feel like an inner revolution to my soul. 

All to this is really leading back to the idea of moving out of isolation and that feels likes like the ultimate goal of collective liberation. Moving out of isolation also means moving into right relationship with plants and tress, the birds and the bees (just to throw in a little well-placed cliche). We need to move out of the collective trauma that tells us we are wrong and bad and everything is our fault. We need to move towards compassion for ourselves and others. It is so fucking traumatic that we are living in this collective illusion that we have to do it all alone. We are traumatized because our parents are traumatized because they grew up in a traumatized culture that taught their parents traumatizing behavior. It’s not our fault. How many times can I say that? If this feels fucking hard and frustrating it’s because it is and we were never meant to understand this alone. Of course your mental health is suffering. 

When I finally began giving myself the opportunity to zoom out I began to gain a lot of compassion and I think that is the purpose of compassion: to understand the circumstances that created the things that feels most abhorrent to accept. Acceptance doesn’t mean rolling over and giving up, it just means we accept reality on realities terms, we feel the associated feelings involved, and then slowly work to change the circumstances as we are called to do so. It’s the difference between responding to reacting. Reactions are usually actions taken based on extreme hurt and unconscious pain and it rarely brings the positive changes we were hoping for. Responding is allowing ourselves to be healed, then to make decisions based on a clear sense of grounding and purpose. 

To paraphrase Martha Beck, we need a soft revolution. I admit I’m not necessarily against the angry revolutionary killings of say, CEO’s of major healthcare industries, but I think the real revolution, the real change, the real liberation is going to come from impossibly small changes to our internal structures. It’s going to come from regrowing our mycelial threads to each other and the earth. It’s going to come from collective joy, preferable in the streets. It’s going to come from showing ourselves and retraining ourselves into community and interconnection. I really love goats and one of the things that I think is so special about them is that from one generation to the next they can go from wild to domesticated and back again, it’s just a matter of training them, or not training them when they are young. Luckily for humans we get to train our children different then we were trained, but we also get to retrain ourselves through tiny moments and movements in our nervous system. We can expand our awareness and remember we are not alone, that we are part of the sea of history that has shored up to this place-time. We can reach out for help when we feel like we are drowning and ask for a buoy. And above all, we can look for the places of safety, even the microscopic ones, and let that fill our bodies with peace and fortification so we can keep going till one day down the line our children will grow up knowing they belong, and that will be the real collective liberation, just knowing we belong.