What’s your pleasure, asks your average service provider? How can I help, or rather, what would you like to consume? What’s your pain asks a therapist or a doctor. There are many symptoms, feelings to choose from: guilt and shame are the big ones…if you’re thinking long-term
Not that fear doesn’t get a look-in. Trauma casts a wide net, is part of everyone’s experience it seems, present and past. Some have it more than others, we think. Do we? To discriminate in that way is a matter of politics, and maybe economics. It depends on who is paying for the listening. On the whole therapists don’t have to decide who is the most traumatized; that is, unless you’re one of those people who thinks we ought to be making those calls, prioritizing a presumably limited, emotional resource. BTW, on the mind-economics front: I don’t agree with those who imply that if we over diagnose trauma we’ll dilute the meaning of the term, and somehow do disservice to the most acutely affected. Thankfully, whatever you think of this society, there are a lot of helping professionals in this interdependent world: roughly 30K practitioners of my discipline alone, in this state alone.
So back to shame and guilt: When shame works it’s not so bad. It breeds humility, a sense of limitation, mortality, and equality, for we are all small. We all die. When guilt works it’s not so bad. It reminds us we can be strong, and in being strong we can be generous, and charitable—giving back to the less fortunate. Guilt precedes redemption.
what’s your pain? Do you feel bad because you hurt someone, because you are hurting someone, and you can’t seem to stop? Does that push you into shame, wherein you decide the future is hopeless, that you don’t deserve to be loved because you are so bad. Will you withdraw as a result: refuse a gift, a more banal token of support, like someone giving you a hand with something you’re not good at, a break on a bill that’s overdue? Will you beg off, saying “I’m good” because in your mind you’re not. Will you try to not need ever again so you don’t have to ask? Will you disappear because you are a monster, that man/monster Mary Shelley wrote about, and will we find you one day shivering in the North Pole?
Do you feel bad because you’re on the other side? Is someone ignoring you, not understanding, or actively pressing a heel to your nose while saying, “what?” in nonplussed self-defense, or shrugging their shoulders, saying “sorry’, though not with remorse—more with sullen helplessness. Do you feel alone, abandoned, your utter unimportance exposed? And is everyone playing the support cast of Hamlet, saying this thing is not happening? Hope. What hope do you have? Do you keep having to ask for what you want or need, everyday? Or will you retreat to your room, to your bed, to gaze at the pet or child that won’t abandon you, and who needs you also. Will you thrash about in that room, or in the streets, screaming but not speaking, hoping the guilty will get something from the noise?
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 