The society keeps the score: (Re)framing trauma as a political experience

In today’s blog, Suralini Fernando from Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand (@GoodShepANZ) explores the link between social security policy and childhood trauma and attachment. Suralini is a social inclusion advocate and yoga facilitator of South Asian heritage, who has an abiding interest in the connections between embodiment, relational safety and belonging.  

Our understanding of trauma is growing

Trauma-sensitive yoga takes a somatic approach to recovery. Photo by Erik Brolin on Unsplash

 Trauma was declared the ‘word of the decade’ last year. Perhaps this is because no other innately human phenomenon has united seemingly disconnected worlds as much as trauma has. From psychiatry to social work, yoga asana and education to group facilitation, trauma has come to influence our thinking and ‘best practice’, usually in the form of trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive approaches.

A welcome by-product of this ‘cultural omnipresence’ is the rich body of literature that has emerged on trauma theory, that continues to grow our collective knowledge and application of it. It is now well-established, for example, that ‘trauma lives in the body’, even when the traumatic experience causes no direct bodily harm. Babette Rothschild captured this sentiment with the term, ‘the body remembers’, describing it as a ‘psychosocial experience’, and Bessel van der Kolk expressed it as ‘the body keeps the score’. These shared perspectives convey the idea that trauma lives on in our bodies through patterning related to a traumatic event even after the threat has passed. Recognising the role that the body plays in storing trauma is a relatively recent development, and it has radically advanced approaches to healing, with trauma-sensitive yoga leading this field.

Another key insight of contemporary trauma theory is that it is a subjective experience. Early definitions of trauma centred the event(s) or circumstances causing physical, emotional, or psychological harm. However, we now understand trauma as an unique individual response to an event or events in which our core needs for safety, belonging and dignity are threatened, thereby activating our stress response and survival mechanisms. This means that two people may experience the same event and yet have very different experiences of it – what may be traumatic for one person may not have the same impact on another. Gabor Maté summarised this distinction as trauma being less about what happens to a person, and more about what happens inside of them as a result.

Secure attachment forms when children’s needs are met. Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

From the individual to the systemic

This is good progress, however, the elevated focus of the individual in our collective understanding of trauma is potentially concerning. If taken too far, it runs the risk of misconstruing individual traumas as singular occurrences or unique problems, by masking the contexts in which human suffering occurs. While there can be no doubt that trauma is generally caused by interpersonal violence, abuse, or neglect, these experiences are influenced by systemic factors such as poverty, discrimination, and oppression.

Parenting is a powerful example of the ways in which our earliest human relationships and broader structural forces intersect. It also illustrates how these intersections can have far-reaching impacts on wellbeing across a child’s lifecycle. Parents are primarily responsible for meeting their children’s needs for attuned attention and responsive interactions which, in turn, can nurture secure attachment. When these core needs go unmet or are taken away, it can lead to disorganised and other insecure forms of attachment, potentially even childhood trauma. Following the socioecological model and social determinants approach, however, this is often not a conscious decision on the part of the parent because parenting processes are shaped by the contexts in which they occur. For example, parents may be responding to acute and chronic structural stressors, such as family violence, poverty, and racism, which hinder their individual access to essential parenting resources such as time, ‘mental bandwidth’, and their own capacities for self-regulation.

Poverty, which is an in-built feature of the prevailing, human-designed economic systems, profoundly impacts parenting. Experiencing chronic financial scarcity has been proven to reduce cognitive capacity. While this can be traumatic in and of itself, it can also directly impact brain processes which are critical for parenting – problem-solving and decision-making, for example, as well as the ability to engage in responsive parenting processes such as play, mimicry, and book reading. The relentless mental strain of constantly having to make do with less robs parents of time, ‘mental bandwidth’ and other inner resources which are essential to parenting in an attuned way. This can undermine secure attachment between parents and their children, potentially causing early childhood and other traumas, and also lead to a range of long-term impacts on children’s emotional wellbeing as cognitive and social development.

Where to from here?

Examining the ways in which oppressive social, political, and economic conditions shape formative relationships enables us to better understand and address how they contribute to trauma(s) experienced by individuals, families, and communities. In the context of parenting, a clear starting point would involve making sure that all parents, regardless of ability, race, and socio-economic status, have the individual and collective resources that they need to parent in a way that nurtures their own safety, belonging and dignity as well as that of their children.

The Coronavirus Supplement eased financial stress for many. Photo by Konstantin Evdokimov on Unsplash

This cannot happen without reforming the social security system, among others, in a variety of ways. Recent changes such as the abolition of punitive mutual obligations programs such as ParentsNext and restoration of supports such as Parenting Payment Single are steps in the right direction. Mutual obligations greatly reduce the time, energy, and inner resources that recipients – often women – need to focus on parenting. However, these measures do not go far or fast enough: in 2022, 3.3 million Australians, including 761,000 children, are still living below the poverty line. What is needed, then, is transformative change which goes to the heart of the system’s deep structures and animating values. Decentering waged work, for example, and valuing the unwaged yet socially necessary work of parenting, as a valid form of productivity and work requiring time, energy, and myriad emotional and cognitive resources.

We have already witnessed the potential for transformative systemic change to uplift individual capacities and, consequently, the interpersonal. As part of a suite of relief measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Australian Government introduced the Coronavirus Supplement and suspended mutual obligations temporarily from April 2020 – April 2021. When the financial stress of chronic poverty subsequently dropped, recipients reported a greater ability to focus on the things that mattered to them, including parenting and other meaningful work.

Of course, social security is not the only system that can enable or hinder secure attachment between parents and their children. Children are raised by parents in families and communities whose access to opportunities and collective resources is limited by a range of determinants which, on a broader scale, influence who has access to safety, belonging and dignity, and who doesn’t. However, recognising how the interpersonal and systemic are deeply interconnected brings us closer to seeing that trauma is as much a political experience as it is an individual psychological and physiological one. Failing to recognise these interdependencies would be a missed opportunity to make the most of living through this ‘age of trauma’.

 Posted by @PNagorckaSmith