An Out-Of-The-Body-Politic Experience

 

Experts say repeated exposure to contradictory, abusive, or crazy behavior, especially when one is unable to resist or withdraw, leads to trauma and that the imprint of trauma on the psyche then interferes with healthy functioning. Children experiencing extremes of hostile, hurtful, or simply negligent actions by caregivers may compensate by escaping mentally from the situation and are prime candidates for addiction as adults.

My dear, late friend Miguel had exactly this life trajectory. His overburdened and detached parents were unaware that he was being sexualized at age 9 by an older teen; he described to me how he learned to leave his body and in his 20s developed both a cocaine addiction and unusual psychic abilities. 

The metaphor for our collective experience as Americans over the last four years writes itself. Week after week, month after month, we were relentlessly assaulted with ever-escalating doses of madness and gaslighting. The source, himself permanently intoxicated with the trappings of faux adulation that accompany power, rewrote the script of our tentatively shared reality in such staccato bursts that we could scarcely digest one irrational claim when a dozen more came raining down on us out of the Twittersphere. The effect was the same as that perfected by the CIA in its far-flung empire of dungeons: disassociation and learned helplessness. Some of us self-medicated with news fixations, substances, Russiagate fantasies, or blogposts.

As adults, we could at least step back and apply our analytical tools, see what was happening to us, consult our peers for grounding and reorientation. Yet, the effort involved in the constant struggle to remain standing during this never-ending turdstorm sapped our energies and imbued our cells with stress hormones. Now we know what it’s like to live as an abused minority, fearing for our children and constantly pouring our psychic resources into staying sane and not flying off the handle. When we failed out of exhaustion, we could do no better than to float our beleaguered social souls upward and away from the body politic to a magical inner realm where people behave humanely and resentment and rancor do not rule. Our collective dissociation, while providing needed relief, came at a cost.

Miguel wandered very young into a new life in Argentina and found a boyfriend who introduced him to injection drug use. He relates that when he came back from the doctor with a positive HIV diagnosis, his first thought was, “At least now Charlie cannot leave me.” Nonetheless, Charlie did.

One effect of Miguel’s traumatic life was his ability to pay extra-corporeal visits to anyone he was thinking about. I once heard him relate an entire conversation that had taken place between an ex of his and the ex’s new lover across town, later confirmed in its details. He didn’t develop this ability further nor make anything of it.

Miguel never lamented his fate nor wasted his short time on blaming anyone, including the injecting “friend” who had failed to inform him of his own HIV-positive status before sharing a syringe. In our brief friendship, I only once, late in his illness, heard him say something that hinted that he wished things had turned out differently: “I’m so young!”

The body politic is damaged by what it has been put through. Nonetheless, it has acquired uncanny perceptivities of its own, perhaps not including astral travel but certainly a sharper eye for the aural presentations of public figures. It’s no accident that Bernie’s mittens are attracting nearly as much attention as Biden’s entire 100-days program. Bernie’s now-famous grumpy-uncle photo, known by some as the Jewish yoga posture “Waiting for the Wife Shopping at Loehmann’s,” aptly reflects our crouching, self-protective national spirit, the mittens themselves an offhand populist rebuke to the purpled elites on the elevated platform.

Miguel shook off his cocaine habit though he slipped into unrecognized alcoholism, which killed him. He was a spiritual giant and died a hero. The trauma never embittered him, never distracted him from making the most of his 31 years on earth. He had a vision of better things; everything he had been through he alchemized into wisdom, compassion, and solidarity.

As we emerge from the chaotic mental landscape left behind by the raging id that permanently tasered us these last years, we can and should hold the perpetrators to account. Magnanimity cannot be a cover for impunity. At the same time, we now have a keener sense of the dangerous forces left to seethe just below the surface of our social body and cannot pretend that the millions of people abandoned by the depredations of capitalism have nothing to do with us or our comfortable lives. Perhaps the new body politic can travel to a higher plane; after all, we have new, trauma-enhanced powers. The violent explosion at the Capitol shows us where we are headed if we do not use them to reset and renew.