Of course, it helps that in both temperament and body language, this friend is very much like my oldest son. I am simply saying it made it easier for that to happen and for an affectionate bond to be created. Another pause here to make another disclaimer: I do not think I have to be able to identify with someone to have empathy with them. But denying who you really are for 5 decades takes its toll on a person and recognizing this allows me to more easily see how my friend’s early social life hurt him. Is this the same as being a closeted gay man? Nope. Even in my own Family of Origin, I had to pretend to be a person I was not most of the time, often a different person with each member of my family. But I had to wear masks to hide who I was inside almost my entire life or risk being socially isolated (brainy girls weren’t popular in the 80s). When I talked with him today, I told him this, but I also told him that in identifying with his pain, I was not trying to co-opt it or say my pain had been exactly like his, because it isn’t, at all. ![]() This allows me to identify with him a bit and creates a bond of more empathy and caring (some things our world woefully lacks). The funny thing is that this friend and his writing often reach out and touch very real painful feelings in me, feelings related to my own trauma. ![]() He has often written about his early life as a closeted gay man and the only person of color he knew and despite his loving family, he suffered because of the very things that made him who he is. Today I had lunch with a friend who is a young, bi-racial, gay man. Surviving trauma should bring people together, not build bigger walls. Suffering from trauma is not a contest and my empathy for you is not based on your meeting a certain criteria of suffering. The fact that I feel I have to lay all this out is one example of the “Trauma Hierarchy” culture I am seeing. I am not even talking about being traumatized by the age-discrimination I have experienced recently in my job search. I am not talking about being “traumatized” because I have to drive the same car 2 years running or there is no Starbuck’s near me. And I am using the words “trauma” and “traumatized” in their original and serious context. What I mean by all this is that there are different types of trauma and none of them are easy to deal with. Because trauma isn’t so black and white, if you’ll pardon the pun. Automatically less traumatized, and hence less worthy of your empathy or help, than people of more oppressed groups? Maybe. More privileged, statistically, than people from more marginalized groups? Absolutely. In our world today, am I, a cis, straight, educated, used-to-be Middle-class woman, greatly privileged? Definitely. They aren’t and my words here simply an attempt to say that while Privilege is a hierarchal issue, trauma is not, and with trauma, things like race, religion, age, gender, and sexual orientation do not make for absolutes. 3) I am attempting to share my thoughts without falling into White Fragility or saying that my feelings are hurt by people of any group. 2) I am in no way denying or trying to invalidate the suffering of any person marginalized and oppressed by society. Before I go any further, however, I want to make some things absolutely clear: 1) I am in no way denying White Privilege or Class Privilege, which are often connected. It seems like the brilliance behind the idea of intersectionality (the idea that the more groups of marginalized people a person belongs to, the more oppression she has experienced) are being misconstrued and the result has become what I call the Trauma Hierarchy. I have begun to think that the quest for equality and the end of the oppression of the Patriarchy and White Supremacy that my friends and I are on is slipping into some kind of contest about which group is more “worthy” of freedom, equality, and empathy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |