Trauma and Activism: A Quest for Wholeness
Activism is a contentious term. Like many words, its use in a multitude of contexts distracts from its true meaning. What is activism, really? Activism for our purposes can be understood as a quest to change the world. While the beliefs behind the changemaking may vary, the vision is a more equitable world for the good of all people. No one who seeks to better their own life is called an activist. Only those who bring the voices of the unheard to the table are called activists. So, activism is viewed as a noble endeavor.
At this time in history at the nexus of late-stage capitalism and ecological collapse, revolution is absolutely necessary. We need to be creating tangible change if we want to protect the vulnerable, the marginalized, and future generations. If revolution is not an end but rather the means, how do we become better activists, changemakers, and revolutionaries?
In answering this question, I’ve reflected on my own role as a young activist in the past five years. I’ve been far from the ideal activist, oftentimes naive and bordering on saviorism: I’m going to save this community using my knowledge! I cringe at my past self.
While there are many ways to ground our activism – whether in theory or praxis – one of the most useful things is to reflect on the role of pain and trauma. Our psychological wounds and trauma leads us to ineffective and self-destructive activism. But, if we reframe activism as a quest for wholeness, we can find answers that ground us in collective healing and bring us closer to radical change.
The World and my Mom
A few months ago, I was dissociating from my body, observing myself as a third party having a nervous breakdown.
I felt like everything I had done in the past year made no difference at all. All the times I had prioritized my organization over university studies, slept late, worried over each social media post and each event, it was all – useless. And I was incredibly burnt out. I had been exhausting my physical and mental energy in the past year. I had just moved to the Philippines and was still adjusting while worrying about – what was first a book but was now – an organization! Overwhelmed, I was considering quitting, but that would be immediately followed by the despair that I can’t quit everything now when things aren’t even finished yet.
I had no way to well and truly yell at the world, so I did what I always do: write. I confided in my notebook where all thoughts were safe and protected by its soft-bound cover. Why won’t you change? Why won’t you change? Why won’t you change?
I was speaking to the world, but upon reading and rereading the words on the page, I suddenly realized, with a softness, that I had asked that exact question to my Mom before. I had confronted my Mom about something she did that hurt me, and rather than apologize, she defended herself and redirected the blame. I was being vulnerable, communicating openly, doing – it seems – everything right, but not getting a crumb of effort back. It was uncannily similar to how I felt about the world not changing.
I thought about it and tried to draw more connections between the two. I knew why my Mom couldn’t change. My Mom grew up differently than I did. She was taught by my grandfather to be tough in order to survive in what was still a man’s world. Coming from the rural province of Nueva Vizcaya and migrating to the city of Metro Manila, then across the ocean to Singapore, she made her life better by being twice as strong as any man – with a similar hidden vulnerability, too. She was taught that apologies are submission. I could see why she couldn’t change yet. I could begin to see why the world wouldn’t change, too. What was the world taught? How has “the world” — air quotes because it’s silly to think about change on the scale of Everything, but here I am doing so anyway — coped with what it was given?
Trauma as Motivators for Activism
From the first ship that landed on the first ‘foreign’ coastline, the world was changed for centuries. People in harmony with the land and each other were othered by white European men, made to be separate and inferior. Those who were soft and nurturing were killed or worse, their land and their bodies stolen from them. Those who knew the secrets of the land passed on their knowledge but soon died out, for that knowledge was not profitable to the white man. Diversity could not be efficiently controlled, so diversity was flattened. From that first ship, the world was traumatized, and this trauma has been continuing ever since.
Many of our actions are iterations of this trauma, whether we know it or not. Connecting it back to my Mom, she was taught that she needed to get a ‘better’ life for herself elsewhere. In a way, it was true, but only because generations of colonization and occupation under Spanish and American imperialism had made her hometown poor. Under our traumatized postcolonial reality, many of our natural human needs (connection to others and to the land, autonomy, food, water and education, etc.) were stolen and have since been routinely unmet.
I realized my desire to change “the world” was also a way to obtain unmet needs. I wanted to feel recognized and to be absolved of guilt. The basic human desires of feeling seen and being free.
The unmet need to feel seen came from being uprooted from my home country at the age of seven, losing my established identity and having to build a completely new one. Growing up a Filipino girl in a largely Chinese country but going to an American school, I had no idea how to be myself under the various cultures I was suddenly placed in. Diaspora kids know how lonely and confusing this can be. Imagine losing your identity as a young child.
The guilt, on the other hand, is intergenerational and cultural: the Filipino values of hard work and frugality founded on the belief that we naturally don’t deserve abundance. This guilt or shame, called hiya in Filipino, is again an old wound from colonization. It was used on us to justify inferior circumstances under the imperialists. This guilt shows up in our lives by demanding that we work ten times as hard and prove to ourselves that we are deserving. I grew up feeling like I didn’t inherently deserve good things, and that I had to work incredibly hard to feel comfortable having them.
Another part of the guilt was the intangible guilt of leaving behind friends and family in the Philippines. As a migrant family, we “made it out.” We “succeeded.” But most people in our homeland did not even have the choice to leave, so there was a tension in our family that can be identified as survivor’s guilt. As I grew up in Singapore and occasionally went home to Manila, this tension wasn’t explicit, but I could sense it. It’s subtle, but it permeates Filipino society and was one of the reasons why I moved back to the Philippines.
Healing in Two Parts
Recognizing where my unmet needs and excess guilt were coming from, I realized my activism was not coming from love or understanding — although I thought I had those things. I wanted to heal the world because I couldn’t figure out how to heal myself. Activism was a quest to feel whole.
I know many activists probably feel the same. It would explain the desperation and the anger behind activism – particularly, climate activism. It makes sense for people traumatized by past and current postcolonial systems; they seek to dismantle the same systems that caused them harm. Alternatively, there are activists bringing their pain from other life circumstances into their work, projecting their pain onto things that seem easier to fix than themselves.
To a traumatized mind, complex external injustices will still be easier to attempt to “fix” rather than old personal wounds. This is because one has to be able to admit they’re hurting to see their inner wounds. If we aren’t ready to admit that, we’ll keep covering up the hurts with work, achievement, and the morality of activism. We’ll keep validating our own pain by telling ourselves we’re doing the essential work. But really, what good is an activist who isn’t a world of peace and joy in themselves? The end does not justify the means; revolution itself is the means. Peace and joy can be found here and now; we just need to plant more of it so everyone can partake.
I needed to stop trying to heal the world and finally heal myself. This was absolutely necessary if I wanted to be an effective activist creating tangible change, but even more necessary because I’m a person, just like any other, who deserves joy and peace (how crazy it is to say that! That was never taught to me).
In the past four months, I’ve been healing intentionally. A lot of that has been allowing myself to feel the extent of my hurts, which is frightening (some things that I had never thought twice about now made me cry). I’ve stepped back from my organization a bit, and I’m grateful that there are many friends who’ve consequently stepped up to continue carrying it.
Activism motivated by our wounds is alarming and disarming. We are forced to stop whatever it is we are seeking to change. This may be uncomfortable and even more painful than staying the same. It was our armor and our identity. But this pain is good and necessary.
We must focus on healing ourselves before we seek to heal the world. We must heal ourselves, in the regenerative spaces between wood and earth, in the silence of dusk, and in the wisdom of our dreams.
We don’t have to be concerned about our character, how it might decay if we focus on ourselves for a while. We might feel selfish and not a good person. But if activism is a quest for wholeness, then we will eventually return to the collective. If activism is a quest for wholeness, then it is the second part of our healing process. Healing ourselves and healing the world.