Walking Between Winds: A Passage Through Trauma Into Healing

Walking Between Winds:

A Passage Through Trauma into Healing

2020. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

For more information regarding permission, contact the author at

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First published as a dissertation:

Reclaiming Ourselves: Societal Trauma and Its Healing

Copyright 2001 by

Darling G. Villena-Mata

Library of Congress

Control Number TXu1-097-003

published as

Walking Between Winds

A Passage Through Societal Trauma

Discrimination’s Impact on Love, Safety, Health, and Conflict

First Edition, 2003

Second Edition, 2005

Third Edition, 2009

Fourth Edition, revised and expanded: 2020.

Renamed as

Walking Between Winds - A Passage Through Trauma into Healing

ISBN 978-1-7350367-0-0 (book)

ISBN 978-1-7350367-1-7 (mobipocket)

ISBN 978-1-7350367-2-4 (ePub)

Cover design: Augusto Silva

Formatting: Polgarus Studio

Dedication

To my parents

Graciela Elisa Granizo Villena de Mata

and

José Alberto Mata Espinosa

Through your love and example,

thank you for helping me

Be

my own storyteller of my life.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Preface: Allowing the Heart to Guide

SECTION 1: DISCOVERING TRAUMA

Chapter 1. Discrimination, Abuse, and Trauma

Chapter 2. Revisiting the Past, While Remembering the Present

Chapter 3. Common Pain, Common Bridge: Adult Children of Alcoholics And Recipients of Societal Trauma

Chapter 4. Culturation Spectrum: Choices on the Road to Living

Assimilation

Bicultural or Polycultural

Traditional

Education and Ageism

What’s in a Word?

Questions to Ask Yourself

Good Cop/Bad Cop Roles

Chapter 5. The Don’t Rules and Basic Human Rights

Passing

Women

Trauma’s Impact onBeing andDoing

Terrorists and Urban Guerrillas: Continuing the Cycle of Pain

Breaking the Cycle: Advocates and Whistleblowers

Family and Differences

Chapter 6. Intra-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Approach: Discovering What Makes Us Who We Are

Area One: Who Am I?

Area Two: Who Are You?

Area Three: Who Do You Think We Are?

Area Four: Loving Differences, Hating Them

Being Ill-Mannered, or Maleducado

Appropriation

Area Five: How Do I Talk to You?

Area Six: On the Bridge of Understanding

Chapter 7. What’s in a Name? Bringing the Word Home

SECTION 2: EFFECTS OF TRAUMA

Prelude: Stranger-Neighbor in Our Midst

Chapter 1. Our Bodies’ Attempt to Keep Us Safe: Fight, Flight, Freeze Responses

Field Generals and Headquarters

TMCS: Choosing Our Battles

The Reptilian in You

Displaced People

The Limbic System

Freeze and Releasing Energy

Outside Energy––It May Not Be Yours

Body Postures: Shake, Shudder, and Sigh

Chapter 2. Soul Retrieval and EMDR

Chapter 3. Trauma Stress Reactions – Normal Responses to an Abnormal World

Triggers: Incoming Threat, or Is It Memory?

Trauma Mechanisms and Coping Skills (TMCS) to the Rescue

Roles People Play: Adult Children of Abuse and Recipients of Societal Traumas

Chapter 4. Memory, Perception, and Trauma – Is it Real or is it Special Effects?

Boundaries: Fences Make Good Neighbors or Prison Walls

Boundary Creations, Self, and Trauma

Chapter 5. The Airplane Scenario – Trusting Yourself or Trusting Them

Chapter 6. Transgenerational Transmissions – The Invisible Hitchhikers

Chapter 7. Revenge – Street Justice or Loyalty to a Traumatic Story?

Chapter 8. TMCS and Trauma – Fear and Safety Tools

SECTION 3: HEALING FROM TRAUMAS

Chapter 1. Sharing Your Heart: Being in the Present

Chapter 2. Realization of Trauma: Identity and Grief Process of Individuals and Groups

The Denier: Traumas Do Not Exist

Attitudes of a Person or Group in Denial

Victim––Ground Zero of Pain

Attitudes of a Person or Group in Victim Mode

Survivor––Learning to Cope, Learning to Breathe

Thriver––On Becoming Human Again, or Maybe for the First Time

Wounded Leaders Perpetuate Cycles of Suffering

Chapter 3. A Wholistic Healing Approach for Those Experiencing Traumas

How Trauma Can Influence Grief and Identity

The Two Griefs

Language

What Do You Keep? What Do You Fear?

Welcome or Beware

Crises, Addiction, and Grief

Meaning, Loss, and Investment

Chapter 4. Getting the Traumatic Energy Out of the Body

The Violence Within Us

SE and SER: Helping the Body Let Go

EFT: A Gift from Gary Craig

Hypnosis: Getting to theBottom Line—the Unconscious

Optimism: Letting Your Heart Sing Its Songs

Pain and Suffering: Separating the Twins

Breathing Life into Your Story

Enhancing Well-Being: The Normal State of Living

¿Cómo Te Sientes?: The Value of Body Positions

The Media: Leader in Healing, or Provider of Secondary Traumas?

Chapter 5. Ancestors’ Legacy: Heritage and Healing

Transforming Time from Master to Servant

The Fear of the Oppressed: Honoring Differences

Chapter 6. Is it Me? Is it You? Is it the Way We Are Communicating?

Is It Me? Is the Trigger in Me?

Is It You? Are You Projecting onto Me?

Is It the Way We Communicate? Are Our Words Interfering?

Chapter 7. Time: Regaining More of our Humanity

Chapter 8. Retiring the TMCS – When Peace becomes Familia

Unhitching the Physical from the Trigger and Embracing the Dream

Chapter 9. Revisiting Faith and Beliefs – Finding a Bridge to Our Hearts

Redefining the Meaning and Traumas

Looking Below the Trauma Layers

Bien Educado—A Way of Living

Storytelling Our Own Lives

Chapter 10. Dreams

DreamQuest Dreams

Concluding Comments

SECTION 4. EPILOGUE: WALKING BETWEEN WINDS

Chapter 1. We Are All Related

Chapter 2. Justice: Bien Educada/Bien Educado

Chapter 3. Walk in Beauty

Glossary and Comments

References and Readings

List of Diagrams

Culturation Spectrum

Intra and Cross-Cultural to Understanding

Effects of Trauma

Limbic System: A Cursory Look

Boundary Creations, Self, and Trauma

Realization of Trauma: Identity and Grief Process of Individuals and Groups

Trauma’s Impact

A Healing Approach for Groups and Individuals Experiencing Traumas

Body-Mind Reactions: Areas of Loss

Prologue

The Covid-19 pandemic had not yet occurred when this book was updated. Is the book relevant here as well?

The answer is yes.

For all too many, the pandemic is making long-forgotten fears, griefs, and traumas re-emerge, as if suddenly unearthed. Will they drag us back to an unwelcome past, or free us to deal with them once and for all?

Our sense of self and security is changing seemingly without our permission, along with our sense of what is normal. Some of those who have gone through war say that this pandemic is scarier. They could handle bombs and firefights but not this.

The pandemic is challenging us on multiple levels. It is making us ask who we are as an individual, family member, friend, as well as a nation. We may fear that the ways we have seen ourselves and acted may not work now. May this book help you find strength in a time of hardship.

Acknowledgments

Remember Who You Are

I believe that no one can go through life successfully without support from others. Offering opportunities, taking a chance on someone, providing a supportive, loving environment, and role modeling—all of these helped in the encouragement I was given to follow my heart, especially during times of changes and transformations. I also want to thank those folks who inadvertently role modeled to me what paths not to take and for the mirroring they provided me to work more on myself. They too were my teachers.

To my beloved parents, José Alberto Mata Espinosa Bolaños de los Monteros (in the last years of his life he was so happy and proud to say his full last names) and Graciela Elisa Villena Granizo de Mata, thank you for giving me the foundations of love, cariño, curiosity, humor, and storytelling through role modeling. You continue to be givers of unconditional love, for which I am and will be forever grateful. Even though both of you are no longer on this plane, I still feel your presence and your guidance. Gracias, mis bonitos Mamita y Papito. You gave me the strength to follow my dreams, no matter how off the main road it has been. Through your love and example, thank you for helping me be my own storyteller.

There are many more people who made this work possible through their support of my own human evolution, for which I am deeply grateful: my family members, Fernando, Guillermo, Dianne, Chloe, Monica as well as my comadres: Nicole Valentino and Maria Greene.

To my sister-friends, colleagues, clients, former students, and participants in my workshops, presentations, seminars, and classes, thank you for your insights.

My prayers go out to all of us who have experienced difficulties in our lives, whether they are society-based, family-based, or individual.

Gratitude to the forerunners and leaders of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA), Co-dependents Anonymous (CoDA), and Alanon (families affected by alcohol) recovery movements. My inspiration came from these movements. I started to understand the great similarity between the coping skills and paths that participants took to heal, and the coping skills and paths of people who experience societal-scale traumas.

I came to realize that regardless of whether trauma was at the micro level of individuals and families, or at the macro level of society, all these groups and individuals have common ground from which they can learn from each other.

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Dana Cloud, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Peter Levine and his foundation, and to the Upledger Foundation.

Special mention to Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her publishers.

Special thanks to Harlon Dalton for allowing me to modify his definition of racism to include other isms in our lives.

Special recognition to the Southeast Asian newcomer families with whom I had the honor to work and to provide service many years ago. I am beholden to them and to Dr. Reverend Paul Janke of Lutheran Social Services of Northern California, who gave me the opportunity to work with refugees and to be of service.

Ultimately, I became served through their stories, spirit, and humanity. Those experiences eventually became a major turning point in my life. Gracias.

A very special thanks to Susan Luton whose patience and encouragement and gentle guidance as an editor and friend helped to make this edition far better than what it was before, despite the software glitches we encountered along the way! And to my brother Guillito (affectionate term) for quick on-spot editing and brainstorming.

I thank Augusto Ace Silva who did a beautiful job of designing the book cover, after many changes and errors on my end. Thank you for your patience and imagination!

Not being one to ever forget, I give thanks always to Spirit or God for all the adventures in my life and for helping me through a variety of ways. Most of all, thank you for the love I never cease to experience, although there were times that I wished I had had more direct guidance!

Author’s Note

This book is a layperson’s version of my Ph.D dissertation, Reclaiming Ourselves: Societal Trauma and Its Healing, which I wrote in an academic style requiring citations and references. Modifying the dissertation to make it more user-friendly to nonacademics produced what you are about to read. Also, this book is written using a specific writing methodology called heuristic, which was developed by Clark Moustakas. As part of that methodology, I included myself in that study. I presented my own process and discoveries, as well as those of others, in experiencing trauma and healing. To pretend that there are no feelings or emotions about this would not be accurate and so choosing the heuristic way was the logical choice.

With this fourth edition, I expanded my focus to also address persons who are not members of non-dominant groups and whose traumas and healing are not affected by factors affecting those of non-dominant groups. Hopefully, this will show that regardless of societal group memberships, we all share many things in common when experiencing adversity and healing.

Coming from a storytelling culture and considering that many nondominant groups are from storytelling backgrounds, I found it only fitting that I would approach topics from that communication style, in addition to the linear, direct approach.

The pronouns I, you, and us are used, since that is also part of a reflection of the way in which many of us discuss issues that affect ourselves as individuals and as members of groups.

For many groups, explanations of the process and how we arrive at our observations and conclusions are expected in a discussion. We also tend to repeat ourselves in different ways. Usually in three’s.

Food provides a good example that crosses many cultures. Would you like a second helping? No, thank you. A few minutes later: There’s plenty of food. A second helping? Thank you, but maybe not. Another few minutes later: Another helping? Yes, thank you!

The first helping is of courtesy. You are eating the food that the cook (usually the mother) spent hours preparing. The second helping shows that you liked her cooking! And the third is saying, Wow. Delicious! The cook beams and feels proud.

I remember that when I was all of six years old our next-door neighbors invited me to join them for dinner. I was a playmate of their daughter. When the mother asked me if I wanted a second helping, I of course said, No, thank you. She said okay and never asked me again.

When I got home, I told my mother that I was still hungry. Could I have something to eat? I asked. As was the custom, one did not load up on the (first) helping so as to make room for the second, and possibly the third. What? my mother said. They didn’t have enough food to give? I shrugged, thinking they might have needed the food for leftovers.

All this to say, there are concepts that I will state in different ways in various parts of the book. For those who are storytellers and from cultures where repetition is part of the dynamics, it will seem fine.

It is not enough to give the bottom line. How we arrive at that bottom line is important for a fuller understanding of the mind and heart. Therefore, individual ownership of experience is shared so that the listeners will understand where I am coming from and know what tone and caring went with the words when discussing matters that affect all of us.

Since I have acculturated to other manners of communication, interwoven into this work are the linear or business-oriented communication style, theoretical paradigms, tables, and key points. Consequently, it is a reflection of communication styles used by different cultures and genders, for that too is part of the story.

This book is primarily meant for individual use as part of educating yourself about what it is that influences the worldviews you hold and the choices you think you are making. Since we all are members of multiple groups—some dominant in society and others not—we all have an investment in understanding how those parts intersect in our lives.

People who have experienced trauma and abuse—from the societal level, to the family level, to the individual level—will be able to relate. Additionally, health and social service practitioners, mediators, and those who work in areas of peace and trauma will find the writing beneficial in helping them develop approaches and modalities in areas of tailoring treatment paths, delivery systems, protocols, and policies.

Those who are in a relationship with loved ones affected by traumas will find the book beneficial as well. Those who are adult children of childhood abuse and other adverse experiences will notice the similarities and commonalities you have with recipients of societal traumas.

What I hope you will discover is that we all wear hats of different groups. It is unavoidable. At least one hat of yours will belong to a nondominant group in your society. We are all related in some manner, in our hopes and dreams, but also in how we cope when faced with shame, fear, abuse, discrimination, traumas, and a sense of loss of self.

May you find this book useful to yourself or to others who walk with you in your life.

Walk in Beauty.

We Are All Related.

Preface

Allowing the Heart to Guide

Never again will a single story be told

as though it’s the only one.

John Berger

John Berger’s quote comes from Arundhati Roy’s book, The God of Small Things. It summarizes what my parents taught me. We are made of many stories. Our lives read like novels, with certain themes and characters highlighted and others given smaller credence and secondary roles. Life can be a series of stories, or it can be one major novel. As we look back on our lives and as we near our departure time, we will see what stories we gave our power to and what stories empowered us.

Life stories are adventures, or aventuras. People are never boring. We all have our life stories, my mother would say in Spanish. "What stories are worth relishing? What stories do you, palomita (little beloved dove), want to pass down to others as showing off the linda alma (beautiful soul) that you are?"

What we choose to highlight and what stories we allow to govern our lives depend on our willingness to be creators of our lives. This is what my mother left me: While God is the almighty creator of all of us, God left us the seeds in our hearts and minds to choose storylines that could honor our souls, storylines that could honor the God that resides in us, waiting to come out. It is up to us to nourish those seeds.

I wrote the following poem after a meditation. As we heal, we search for meaning in our lives. How do we want to live our lives? We turn to finding God or Great Spirit to give us guidance. Yet many of us search outside ourselves because looking within may be too painful. Life and its wonders and sadness can be passed from generation to generation.

While we may search for God outside of us, eventually we discover that God or Great Spirit has been waiting for us to come home.

God of the Universe,

You are around me and in me.

Yet I have sought you in rituals,

in other people’s cultures, in other people’s words.

God of the Universe,

You are around me and in me.

Yet I have sought you frantically, fervently,

running to see you, to feel your presence.

God of the Universe,

I traveled far and wide

from my home to distant lands

seeking wisdom of you from others.

God,

I got tired and dejected.

I felt good when I was doing the rituals,

and when I was

meeting and listening to others who have seen you.

Yet.

I felt not nourished nor fully grounded,

It felt temporary.

Not long-lasting at all.

God of Love…The Divine,

I got tired and finally went home.

And there you were, waiting for me.

As I embraced myself

I found you there,

residing in me, through me, and around me,

Waiting to be noticed.

In my life adventures, I have come across the sacred and the miraculous. I have also come across life tragedies, traumas, and the unknown. How do I approach those stories that seek to engulf my very nature, my identity of being a wonderful human being and a child of God?

We met wonderful people when we came to the United States. We immigrated with stars in our eyes and songs in our hearts. We believed what people from the United States were saying of their country, and soon to be our homeland. Land of milk and honey. Fairness. Equality for all. Equal education for all. A land where hard work will lead you to prosperity.

When we arrived we were met by wonderful people. Missionary friends, new American friends, and people from the churches we attended greeted us with civility, courtesy, and encouragement. My parents were optimistic, and they role modeled that perspective to us, the children. What we had learned about the United States appeared to be true after all—land of the free and open arms to all.

But then a larger reality set in: racism and other isms that would induce societal traumas. Discrimination would make its way into our lives, both as recipients and as witnesses to others being on the receiving end of discrimination’s effects.

This book is about reality as I perceive it. It is the reality that holds what I call isms—racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, among others. It is a book about how these isms can affect our souls, our beliefs about ourselves, the strategies we unknowingly develop to keep us safe; how traumas from isms affect us as human beings; and how healing can take place. We will explore how traumas from family and individual adverse experiences (childhood and adulthood) are similar in terms of symptoms and healing with societal traumas that have arisen from isms experiences.

It is also about how individuals experiencing abuse and neglect within families—whether in the dominant culture or not—have similarities of coping in order to stay safe and, sometimes, sane. It is about a struggle fought by many people to go from existing to living—whether because of societal or familial trauma, no matter in what country.

It is a book about hope and faith. It is about how we can obtain passage when we walk between the winds of traumas and changes, and transform them into life’s adventures.

SECTION ONE

Discovering Trauma

… we talked with many Native American

and Alaskan people and several first- and

second-generation immigrants

to this country.

Their family dynamics and survival

characteristics resemble those of persons

raised in alcoholic homes to a striking degree,

whether alcohol was a factor in their

childhood or not.

Jane Middleton-Moz and Eleanor Fedrid,

The Many Faces of Grief, Changes (magazine)

Chapter 1

DISCRIMINATION, ABUSE, AND TRAUMA

People who have been the recipients of discrimination and abuse are often left to fend for themselves. They are marginalized and told that it is their personal responsibility to get over what society has inflicted upon them—or what their families have done to them.

As victims, they are seen as whiners and told, Can’t you put that behind you already? As survivors, they become invisible again as they struggle with their own internal demons to be sane and normal. As success stories, they are held up as examples of what can be done if all your people would follow your lead. Or, Why can’t you be more like them? They don’t complain and they had it tougher in their families.

For many people, discrimination can lead to societal traumas. Discrimination is not an intellectual observation. It touches the hearts and bodies, the very souls of people faced with it day after day.

Societal trauma is the harm done to people not because they are individuals, but because of their membership in a particular group, whether the group is based on, for instance, class, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or body shaming. While this harm may be imposed by members of other marginalized or nondominant groups, discrimination and societal traumas serve to reaffirm various structures of dominance in society.

Trauma is a life-changing, devastating, often overwhelmingly (physically, mentally, and/or emotionally) painful, stressful experience with far-reaching repercussions. If unattended, trauma can create disruptive obstacles in the growing and healing process of an individual or of a group. Trauma involves an unresolved fight, flight, or freeze response. Stress is a low-level reaction to such a response.

The fight, flight, or freeze response is the body’s way (via the sympathetic nervous system) of giving you extra strength and of making all your senses super-aware of what is going on around you. This happens when there is a perception of harm coming your way—a life-threatening harm. That threat can be physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, etc. While you are in this state of preparing to protect and defend yourself or of getting away, the cognitive mind goes into an either-or view of the world. Time becomes the enemy. You have no time to think about it. You have to put things and people into categories. If your memory, experiences, or exposure to the media and others have created stereotypes of people and situations, you fall back on these to give you quick guidance for an immediate response. First responders and military personnel are trained to analyze situations very quickly so as to avoid knee-jerk reactions.

The freeze part of the response was added a little over twenty years ago. Freeze will be further discussed later in the book. Essentially, if you believe that you cannot fight your way out of the threatening situation for whatever reason, or if there seems to be no way to escape—no exit—then the body will try to make itself very still in an attempt to be invisible to the potential threat.

My contention is that trauma is the result of a perception that the life-threatening experience in one’s life was not successfully dealt with. So the body does not stand down. It stays on alert; it does not deactivate the immune system’s fight, flight, or freeze response. Peter Levine introduced this concept. It is not the life threat that creates the trauma; it is the perception of not being successful in addressing it. Think about it. First responders would be severely traumatized for any life threats they encountered.

The concept that trauma stems from a perception, rather than the actual life-threatening situation, is not new. What has been added to this conversation is the concept that Levine introduced in his earlier workshops and in his writings. He connected the psychological perception with the physiological response to that perception. (This also will be further discussed later.)

Trauma can also occur as the result of discrimination. If there is a perception of a failure of fighting or fleeing or freezing—whether it is in a physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological sense—the group and its members will experience trauma.

Perpetrators of discrimination can knowingly or unknowingly sow the seeds of trauma. However, trauma is different from discrimination, in that the receiver of discrimination need not be traumatized.

What does any kind of trauma do to us?

It forces us to look at life through the lens of loss, grief, and concern for safety. It can challenge us to hold on to our humanity when others have forgotten theirs. Trauma pushes us to change our way of being and behaving in the world when we least expect it, or when we do not want it.

Grief can change personal ways of being in the world: routines, habits, perceptions. If the loss is of one’s job or housing, and the reason for the loss involves discrimination, that loss is not simply about a job or a home (which can probably be replaced), but how one is perceived as a human being. We may question ourselves: Who are we? Who am I to be targeted this way? Shame or embarrassment may enter the picture, especially if the same type of loss repeats itself.

Any form of bigotry can also affect the soul, regardless if one is from the dominant group or a nondominant group. Words, tone, and/or energy that promise possible physical threat or some form of harm, if experienced enough, can burrow into a person’s mind.

Additionally, trauma affects the body. Specific physiological changes take place when there is any perceived threat to the individual or to his or her livelihood. Like a pebble thrown into society’s lake, the pebble’s waves continue until they reach the edges of that lake—affecting everything in their path. Those people who are affected the most are those closest to that center of the trauma. While I see trauma affecting the waters, the emotions and the life force of people, others may view it as an isolated occurrence on land.

Societal trauma can be experienced by a whole society or by a group (for example, genocide or victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, with a primary focus on killing or maiming interethnic Bosnian families).

It may also be inflicted by an entire society on a particular group of people within that society. An example is the Holocaust in World War II. Within Germany’s borders, the mentally and physically disabled, Gypsies (Roma), communists, trade unionists, Slavic peoples (such as Poles), anarchists, gay men and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, and other groups not deemed worthy to live were forced into concentration camps or killed in pograms. Over eleven million people died; six million were of Jewish background.

In the United States, an example of societal trauma is the legacy of Anglo European American society’s maintenance of slavery, and later of legal segregation concerning Africans and African Americans. Similar latter actions were directed toward Mexican Americans, notably in the southwestern states and in California.

Other examples include the genocidal actions toward Native Americans and First Nations in North America: the reservations created for them, and the boarding schools established to wipe out their cultures. Forced internment camps legitimized for Japanese Americans during World War II. Throughout history regardless of countries one finds groups targeted within the boundaries of those countries. In the United States’ history for example, coolie (derogatory term used often at that time) (anti-Asian), anti-Irish, and anti-Semitic laws and their enforcement, affected many generations to come. Societal trauma can be enforced at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels. While such overt isms may now be part of history for many countries, covert ones may continue.

There are many countries whose histories are filled with horrors done to other human beings because they belonged to groups not popular with the dominant group. Fear, hatred, shame, nightmares, and how one perceives themselves and others are passed down to the next generation—consciously and unconsciously. Even when the major horrors have stopped, if there are reminders in one’s society that safety is once again threatened, those ancestral memories and one’s own memories are awakened again.

By allowing isms to continue and by not acknowledging their continued effects of creating further societal trauma, society, through its governmental institutions, impedes the attempts of societal healing of those members affected by such trauma.

In a society that places a