• it / its

local queer disaster pack of critters | ΘΔ &
mid 20s


tjc
@tjc

45% of Americans polled in 2019 said that they believe in demons. Even those of us who consider ourselves rational enough to not hold that belief might use figurative language like "facing your demons" to describe confronting past trauma, depression, or a substance use disorder. (For example.)

Mental health issues are being destigmatized, and that means it's easier to talk about your mental health issues and get help for them, or so people say. I'm reading The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, and while I'm not too far into it yet (I keep trying to read in the sauna at the gym and I haven't invested in good enough earplugs to not get distracted by people who use the sauna as a phone booth), it isn't what I expected it to be. Foucault wrote in the 1970s that contrary to popular belief, sex was never really repressed or hidden, and talking about sex openly was nothing new -- in fact, it was a re-instantiation of the centuries-old practice of confession, made most popular by the Catholic church. But instead of confessing your sins to a priest who was supposed to hold them in confidence, now the imperative was to confess them to a psychiatrist or other medical professional, supposedly to unburden yourself (as with religious confession) but also to feed a surveillance apparatus that had begun to take an interest in monitoring the various ways in which people fucked.

I wonder if there are some parallels with that view of sexual openness (and I'm not sure yet if I endorse it or not) and mental health. We are encouraged to confess our sins mental health issues; ads on (seemingly) every episode of every podcast implore to talk to a professional about what's bothering you, so they can help you learn to solve problems. Not just any professional, of course, but one you can access with an oh-so-convenient computer program.

We are told it's healthy to unburden ourselves about our depression, our anxiety, our trauma, our issues with substance use. (Though if you have a diagnosis like "narcissistic personality disorder", that's probably something you should keep to yourself lest you be blamed for everyone else's trauma.) And perhaps it is. But as with sexuality, the surveillance functions of such unburdening are obvious. People known to have mental health issues can be subjected to police "wellness checks" that, especially for Black people, often end in death; can be subjected to incarceration (that is, involuntary confinement in jails that are euphemistically called psychiatric hospitals).

I don't wish to downplay the extreme violence that can ensue when you are open about your mental health issues, especially if you are also poor and racialized. There is also another kind of control that I have more personal experience with, which is a discourse that excludes mentally ill and traumatized people from full participation in society. The war happens on multiple fronts: while mentally ill people with the fewest resources to compensate for illness and disability get removed from society forcibly, those of us with a few more resources, who might act in solidarity with that first group, get excluded softly, through a cumulative process of ostracizing acts.

What I mean is that while we're encouraged in supposedly welcoming, diverse spaces to disclose our traumas, our disabilities, our mental illnesses; to "be our authentic selves" or whatever; what we disclose will be used against us. (So much for the tolerant left!) Perhaps you might try, for example, to start a conversation about how to protect people in your community from one of its members who repeatedly abuses others. Perhaps you have been told that this was "exile culture" (you see, the far right didn't invent the term "cancel culture", it just co-opted it) and that because you are traumatized, you're inventing an unsafe situation where there is none.

Or perhaps you might tell your colleague, "I don't feel safe when cis heterosexuals around me are praising one of our industry's notorious homophobes for being so nice to them. That sounds a lot like the logic of, 'He never sexually assaulted me so he never sexually assaulted anyone.'" And they might respond, explicitly or implicitly, by turning your words back onto you: if you don't feel safe, that's your problem. I would never say the f-word, so I can't possibly be a homophobe myself just because I defend the reputations of homophobes. So you must be mistaken. You're not unsafe; you must merely be triggered. And if you are, that makes it your problem, and something you really need to work on so that I can say whatever I want without being made uncomfortable by someone pointing out who pays for my own comfort.

There are many ways it can happen, but the common element is that you're being difficult, or making more comfortable people think about what they would have preferred to ignore. It doesn't matter if you are never comfortable. Desperate to shut you up or (if that doesn't work) push you out, the more-comfortable-than you will weaponize pseudo-therapeutic language against you and tell you that you need to:

heal your trauma

What does it mean, exactly, to "heal" complex trauma? I haven't found the answer to that yet. But I think the kind of healing that this type (and you've met this type, or at least seen their posts shared on Facebook or heard about their book that all the hip queers are talking about having read) has in mind is actually a kind of compliance.

I think Foucault was onto something: people don't actually have a lot of new ideas, and a lot of the ones that have persisted are basically religious, even if the Enlightenment forced those ideas into superficially rationalist or scientific shapes. So another way to frame healing-as-compliance is: healing as exorcism.

Trauma, then -- to those who demand compliance -- is a demon that gets inside you and makes you act really annoying. "You're only saying that because of your unhealed trauma. Come back when you've gotten healed, but don't bother us in the meantime." This model of "healing" is really just re-skinned exorcism. There's some thing inside you that takes you over and makes you act unacceptably, and you have to go to a licensed (read: ordained) professional who can practice the arcane art of getting it out of you.

If 45% of Americans still admit to believing in demons, maybe the rest of them do too and just won't admit it. They have other names for demons, like "trauma".

Real therapy isn't much like exorcism. There's no dramatic movie moment when the demon comes out and you know it's gone for good. (I haven't seen that movie, so I'm kinda waving my hands here.) There is no moment when you are "healed". Over time, you just learn to live with it. Seeing a licensed therapist is one thing that can be helpful, but there are others, and no single strategy is mandatory; it depends on what resources you have available and what feels tolerable.

Exorcism, or at least as it persists as a cultural concept, takes the bad thing, the contamination, out of you for good, and returns you to the pure, good person you were before the bad thing happened. Like how a surgeon cuts out a tumor. The thing, the trauma, the mental illness -- it's not part of you, says modern mental health discourse. It's an invader, something that must be violently removed.

That's not really like therapy either, or at least not the kind that works, which is about accepting that you will never become a non-traumatized person -- just one who might be able to live with it in a way that allows more joy to sneak in.

We don't shame people for being traumatized anymore, and isn't that great? Instead, we shame them for not having healed their trauma. Exorcists advertise everywhere, so if you can't be bothered to go to one, that's on you. We don't shame people for having mental illness, either -- so much progress has been made! Instead, you will get shamed for not trying meditation, SSRIs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, ketamine, long walks in the woods, crystal healing, or whatever your interlocutor believes is the silver bullet. Whatever they think the thing is that will get the demons out of you and make you compliant again.

One of the functions, then, of increased openness about mental illness and trauma is so that you can be surveilled and presented with a series of recommendations for how you ought to subject yourself to exorcism so that you can go back to being a good churchgoer... I mean, a productive worker, or a cooperative activist, who in either case doesn't ask too many questions about the system you're placed in. It might be an advertiser who presents you with those recommendations -- even mental illness can be monetized these days. (Maybe, in fact, it's one of the raw materials the economy currently extracts the most from, especially if you factor in ostensibly subclinical stress and burnout.) Or it might be someone who says they're your ally.

To befriend your demons instead is to be non-compliant. Your demons might know things that other people don't: for example, how the family can be a site of abuse and domination, and just what those general terms mean to you as far as the attempts at human sacrifice that you survived. To treat your trauma as a source of knowledge, and not as a demon to be exorcised, makes you a threat. You need healing. It's so unfortunate, but we would just be enabling you if we let you be mentally ill around us.

And the more disclosure there is, the more you're likely to get consigned to the exorcist whether you disclose your own history or not. There's so much knowledge out there about mental health that anyone can be a diagnostician. If you can take inventory of all the people around you who have BPD, or NPD, or the bad kind of bipolar, or who haven't healed their trauma, then you know exactly who you don't need to listen to, and in some cases, who you can blame. The concept of a scapegoat is an old one, too.

Endnote: I was inspired to write this by a Facebook post by Janae Elisabeth; my intent is to take some of what they said and run with it, because it's a post I pretty much entirely agree with. In particular, they write: "A lot of trauma that we think is in the past is actually also in the present because the systemic issues and dangers that caused the trauma are still alive and active today." This is part of what I mean about how trauma is a source of knowledge. But what really got me thinking was this comment on the post (also written by Janae Elisabeth): "Healing is not a bludgeoning tool to force us to go a different way than we’re going. Healing is compassion that allows us the space and safety to potentially make a new choice." I have thought before about how coercively the concept of "healing" also gets used ("if you don't heal, then you can't sit at our lunch table), but the clarity of this statement got me thinking about how easily "openness" can foster coercion.


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in reply to @tjc's post:

It's been interesting to watch the trajectory of my social circles, seeing all the awakenings, retweets of things like “cringe is dead” and “neurodivergence only became a problem once Capitalism showed up,” then seeing other members of the community speak up and say, “you still treat us like shit.”

I had a “Communications” class in college that flat-out said I should quickly abandon anyone who displays any kind of negativity or flaw. The way to success is to surround yourself with successful people, because the damaged people will only slow you down. Like, that was class material. From a book.

It rubbed me the wrong way back then, but on reflection, it's taken on a new level of disgust. Framed in this light, I guess it's a lot like a religious admonition to “keep the faith” regardless of what evidence is right in front of us. The path of righteousness is perilously narrow, and no one wants to be the one remembered for turning into a pillar of salt.

"I had a 'Communications' class in college that flat-out said I should quickly abandon anyone who displays any kind of negativity or flaw."

that's horrifying, but it says something about why the class existed and who was shaping the curriculum: this is business culture talk, which idolizes the ruthless pursuit of success and "positivity" and tossing people into the garbage if they harsh your moneymaking buzz. obviously this "Communications" class was meant for the business-minded. ~Chara

i really like this post but i'm also struggling with it. i think everything you say is correct as you've stated it, but i worry that this mentality can lead to its own form of complacency - maybe because i've already seen it in the most dejected, dark parts of places like tumblr.

this is the idea of anti-treatment, and the lack of desire to heal (in any form) at all. the conception that anyone who says "you're harming yourself and others, please get treatment so you can stop being destructive" is conspiring against you, part of Big Pharma, or otherwise trying to kill your "demons" who you've entwined so thoroughly with your identity you can't conceive of a 'you' that interacts with the world in a less catastrophic way.

my "demons" from my [various issues] can be extremely destructive and dangerous. and sometimes that means i've been destructive and dangerous to others. i feel like people drawing a line and saying "please heal yourself apart from us so you don't hurt us again" is reasonable, not something that inherently "demands compliance".

i do agree that the conception of what healing is and what it requires in our commodified and puritan society is very destructive as well, i think all of that is correct. your analysis of disclosure of trauma as evangelized "confession of sin" is really on point. often what it takes to heal is realizing the world is itself mad, and whatever coping methods we developed to survive aren't inherently 'crazy'/demonic, or at least not moreso than society's impositions.

but i feel like refusing to acknowledge that maybe your demons/trauma are wrong and harmful sometimes is not inherently "non-compliance" (with implications of punk and rebellion in an oppressive world) - i think that's a dangerous path. everything you're told -- either by the voice of your favorite podcast, your licensed therapist, or whispering in your head -- all deserves to be examined critically.