Posted by alexandra_k on August 4, 2019, at 5:22:38
In reply to Empathy, posted by sigismund on August 3, 2019, at 10:27:15
Yep, that's right, again. I made a list of all the vacant one-bedroom apartments (''Quest'' and ''Waldorf'' and similar hotel chains) that have kitchens and bathrooms and laundry facilities in the apartments and air conditioners... That were all empty. All empty. All vacant rooms. All rooms to be given to ''temporary'' tourists or people travelling on business... While the ''likes of me'' are forced into boarding houses with people who are waiting to go to drug treatment or who are fresh out of drug treatment or jail or whatever...
I think we are finding out ''class-based'' roots...
I think it comes from trauma. I have been thinking a lot, recently, about considering groups as persons. Considering a people or a cultural group as a person. To consider the trauma of the holocaust for the Ashkenazi Jewish Culture (I don't know that that is the right way to put that). How seeing things through that lens / those people through that lens.. Led to development of psychoanalytic theory. It was largely a Jewish thing...
And it was criticised for that. I mean... The 'universal' insights, or whatever, were thought to be not universal but peculiar to a smaller group of people in less of a time...
But I have been thinking about the trauma involved in growing up in New Zealand. Most of us grew up in houses that were very very very cold and humid. It is a cold that you really feel deep in your lungs and also in your bones. I more recently learned about the fungi that will get deep in your lungs and also in your bones. It is... Well... A concretization of the feeling... The intense feeling of pain and of something being wrong a physiological body crying about the pain in the lungs and the bones. From being cold.
It is a very traumatising environment. Which is odd, right, because the temperature isn't as harsh as the cold of Canada or the heat of Florida or whatever. But we don't have the infrastructure precisely because it isn't harsh enoguh to kill you quickly. It is harsh enough to torment you and traumatise you...
And then there is this trauma bonding thing that people do...
Like... x has suffered. X validates their own suffering by inflicting that which made them suffer on others and seeing that that which is inflicted on others makes others suffer, too. The person then feels some kind of goodness in trauma bonding. That is a way of them validating the suffering of their inner child. Something like that.
People become more invested in trauma bonding than in removing the source of the trauma. More invested in trauma bonding than in helping others avoid the trauma.
That's why it feels constantly like people are dragging back and down dragging back and down. The people want to be all 'it hurts - see!' and live there in that state.
I remember that when I first moved to Australia. The trauma of arriving in Australia. The... Regression. I remember being 'things are much better for me, here'. But then feeling I didn't deserve somehow. Was an imposter somehow. Didn't belong somehow. Then feeling all kinds of bad for feeling like... Relaxing into things. Being happy into things. Would be doing a dis-service to my inner child. I needed to trauma bond with my inner child from a better place for a while. Which made me... A toxic person to others. I see that.
Anyway...
Try and minimise time spend with the toxic and stay on track...
What occurred to me was that people ran away from the UK. Were sent away as criminals or fled... Left there for a better life. The people who weren't valued back home. Now... They seem to think it is their turn to inflict that which they fled on others...
There absolutely is a 'us vs them' thing in NZ. In Dunedin it was very apparent that there was a group of people (white New Zealanders) kept in inter-generational poverty.
The people in suits... Always struck me as something 'monkey in a suit' about them. Because that was where they came from... But more than that... Because they buy into the hierarchical squabbling way of life...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1105592
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20190413/msgs/1105605.html