Living conditions

I wrote a piece on The Outpost yesterday about flourishing, and how this had started ten years ago as an idea about the necessary conditions in Argentine tango social dances for good dancing, but took on a wider scope over the years as the theme persisted. After the difficulties of the last few years I seemed to be seeing the question from the other end: not what conditions allow flourishing, but also what removes those conditions. One can survive grief, difficulty, effort, disappointment, fear, even trauma, but living things need some basic conditions in order to keep turning towards life.

To survive is to flourish if you are a plant: Considering a flowering rose, would one say it had flourished if it had not bloomed? One would rather say that it was a rose bush or it would be qualified in some way.  If we point to a rose bush and say "this is a rose" what we actually mean is "this will become a rose" because the rose is the flower, not the bush.  

So, through difficulty, my reflections on this topic have expanded from wondering what the pre-conditions are that allow a great dance to Argentine tango music, to wondering what the preconditions are for a life of flourishing.

For a person, those pre-conditions are not especially glamorous. If there is safety the body need not be constantly braced and safety is one of the first pre-requisites for human life. The amount of bracing in modern life indicated by sore shoulders, necks, jaws, pelvises and other common holding points suggests many people don’t feel safe, irrespective of whether they admit or even know it.

I wonder now to what extent flourishing is culturally defined.  My sense of it is that people need agency enough to act, refuse, choose or leave. We need privacy and boundaries, truthful recognition enough to be heard - and believed; moral coherence enough to live in a world where care, fairness, loyalty and non-cruelty have genuine meaning and relational belonging enough to know that one has a place, a role, a voice, a meaning in the lives of others. All these things allow the maintenance of a sense of self and of agency over that self.  Those ideas of a self and of agency would be familiar to many people in modern societies even while these may have developed in ways that it could be argued preclude them.

The conditions also include a kind of sensory and practical coherence. The world has to be readable enough. People, objects, routines, rules, promises, rooms, messages and meanings have to hold still enough for the nervous system to orient itself. A person needs food, sleep, movement, nature, light, rhythm, quiet, beauty, play, interest, and contact with people who are not predatory. These things can sound ordinary, even trivial, until they are removed.

Domination, coercion and control attack exactly these ordinary conditions. They do not only hurt by acting abruptly, dramatically, unilaterally and self-interestedly. They hurt by making the world less livable. Life is made unpredictable, rushed, surveilled, disbelieved, invaded, disordered and unsafe. A disruptor plans ahead, creates double or triple binds, ensuring there is no safety, less and less agency, forcing the prey into a smaller and smaller space. They create a maze with cul-de-sacs at every turn. The prey's world is not their own to manage. It is controlled by someone else's will and devious strategy. Truth is replaced with narrative control, relationship is replaced with domination.  Exile takes over from belonging.

One of the most damaging forms of coercive control is epistemic control: the seizure of the power to define reality. It is not only that someone lies. It is that they position themselves so that others hear them first, believe them first, defer to them first. They become the interpreter of events, the gatekeeper of information, the respectable voice in the room. The harmed person is then not merely hurt, they are removed as a credible witness to their own life and to their legitimate roles. This is known as epistemic injustice and is a flourishing area of modern philosophical enquiry.

This matters because being believed, having standing in shared reality, is one of the conditions of human flourishing. A person cannot flourish if they are constantly forced to prove the obvious, defend against falsehood, correct distortions, or fight to be recognised as a knower of their own experience.

Moral injury is related but not identical. Moral coherence is the assumption of shared moral values or norms: it is the contract regarding the way we live together in society. Deliberate rupturing of that moral fabric by morally transgressive behaviour, where ordinary values are treated as if they were naïve or irrelevant can cause moral injury. When family does not behave as family and protective or investigative agencies do not act as such there are two types of moral injury present - the primary betrayal is by family and the secondary betrayal by agencies that should have protected or investigated. The injury is not only “I was harmed, my loved ones were harmed.” It is “the world in which this was possible is not the world I thought I lived in.”

What does it look like if you don’t have those fundamental pre-conditions for a safe life that will allow flourishing? I have written elsewhere about the specific harms, in posts such as "Narrative containers", "Miasma", "Triggers", "My relationship with mum now", "Abusive control mechanisms", and "Living in fear". Those were containers, really: places to put things so I did not have to keep circling them. They are not really “for” the public but they seemed to need to be public, to help with closure. Perhaps it was a way of restoring voice and perhaps that was necessary.

But the effect is still here. I jump at everything. Someone closed a bin in a shop this week and I jumped out of my skin, gasped, a year after the active trauma was supposed to have ceased. This is commonplace. Almost every day I still “see” the abuser in the news, in cars in my town, in the heavy build of some men, in a half-seen profile. I routinely find myself scanning for “female social service types”: female, Scottish, working age. Even now, my shoulders are often hunched or half-hunched, which is an unconscious response to fear. At the GP, I still cannot speak because my GP practice recreates the trauma environment of being disempowered, disbelieved and framed a certain way. Under the trauma I was and felt watched, accused, diminished, marginalised, manipulated, and regularly shocked by the abusive behaviour that caused that moral injury. I was too afraid to respond, most of all afraid of provoking worse attacks. My legal and family roles were taken from me or redefined around me. My relationships were altered by removal, accusation, narrative control and power. 

I was exhausted. Movement reduces. Speech reduces or stops in those conditions. My brain stopped processing properly. My system shut down under specific attacks. Finally, I forgot who I was, or the core of my being and my preferences seemed very far away, as though they belonged to someone else. At the end, my body was caught in spasms, I had no language left, just guttural, terrifying sounds and a paralysing sense of terror and helplessness - exactly as designed by the perpetrator’s strategy and actions.

This is why coercive control is so hostile to flourishing. It does not merely remove happiness. It removes orientation. It removes the conditions in which the body can stop scanning and move, the mind can think freely, the voice can speak, the self can act, and the person can belong.

If flourishing is the flower opening, then the pre-conditions for it are the roots, soil, light, water and weather. They are easy to overlook because they are ordinary, but the ordinary conditions are the essential ones. A person, a community, a dance does not come alive through force or domination. Life is not produced by command but rather emerges under the right conditions.

The state of being responsive to propitious conditions is precisely what a tyrant wants to change because they want a different order: one they control. One is no longer a free entity, but one controlled. It is the difference between a person and someone subject to the will of another, between a wildflower and a food crop. If the tyrant attacks, undermines, dismantles, poisons the propitious conditions for flourishing, the response of the person, or the community if it's a larger tyrant, will be forced to change to their will.

Recovery then, in someone who has experienced relational trauma is not only about symptom reduction. It is also about the restoration of the conditions propitious to them: truth, safety, rhythm, agency, privacy, beauty, movement, trustworthy people, meaningful roles, shared meaning and values, and the right to be alive and to not be afraid to be alive nor to take up space, to have a voice and to be oneself.

"Safe place"

My third therapist is pleasant and more focused than the last who had to leave for personal reasons. She asked: Is there a place where you feel safe?  This is a standard thing, apparently, in EMDR work (a type of therapy often used in longer-term or complex trauma) because there is a preparation/stabilisation phase before activating traumatic material. The therapist wants to know whether your nervous system can access even a small calm/safe state or resource to help you return to the present, regulate distress, and close sessions safely.

When the second therapist had asked me this question, I thought about of my tent. There, I don't expect to be attacked although I did once camp with someone whose locked car was attacked by a thief breaking a window right next to him as he slept. In my tent, there are no demands, no pressure, no jobs besides those tasks I bring with me.

Camping at the place in Devon that has sometimes felt for like a sanctuary, I am immersed in nature: the hoot of three kinds of owl at night, crickets chirruping in the day, the calls of birds at dawn, the scurrying of small creatures in the undergrowth.  But recently, I went to an event there where the grass was long, the host had Lyme disease for the fourth time, though was perfectly sanguine about it.  Still, I had picked a more public tent pitch than usual and felt exposed. The thermometer hit 40 degrees and the tent, in full sun, was uninhabitable all day.

Camping elsewhere, recently I wasn't given a choice of pitch and rather than being tucked away in my choice of corner beside a hedge I again felt exposed, in my little pocket of vulnerable polyester, to the gaze of strangers in fortress-like campervans, 

In yet another site this year I was attacked through the night by seagulls pecking at the fabric, which at first felt remarkably like someone banging violently on the tent. So, no, my tent doesn't feel all that safe anymore.

So when the third therapist asked this question about a safe location, I considered the tent but this time, rejected it.

The  next thing that came to mind was the memory of a particular dance. Actually, it wasn't even the dance I remembered, it was the embrace as a place of safety.  Place is important considering the next question she asked. It was a sense of safety in the embrace at a moment of stillness and connection. The safety came I think from this sense of being held, not just literally, but in some sense, relationally, yet outside time, meaning, impossibly, except for in that very moment.  How, then, that sense of safety could persist across time is puzzling.

The person embracing I don't know particularly well. In fact I was surprised this came to mind at all. I didn't mention it to the therapist because how can you describe a dance embrace with someone you don't really know and that you experienced once, as a place of safety? 

There was no invitation I was aware of from that dancer again for a year which, despite all my experience of, knowledge about and confidence in "not taking things personally" caused other issues that I sat upon, hard. So had I been asked me to think consciously and rationally about a safe place, rather than intuitively, which is where a lot of therapy work seems to happen, for that reason that embrace was about the very last place I would have suggested. 

I realised later perhaps it is precisely that kind of embodied safety, especially a kind of relational safety that could be so key to this work. On calm, rational reflection, would I choose that embrace, that moment held outside of time as my safe place now? No, because I still distrust a sense of safety that stands in relation to a person, even in a memory, even when the sense of safety was more to do with the embrace, the moment, the embodied sense, than the character and traits of the person it belonged to. Is that a mistake, that rational choice over the intuitive one? I'm not sure.

So I said no, there was no place of safety.  At the time, I had forgotten about floating. Floating in the empty lido at Droitwich on that journey, during the strange week of dissociation and disconnection that led me, unexpectedly to Wilderness Tango for the first time, became a later reference point for safety.
 It's apparently a common motif for people in this context.

The therapist asked if, instead, I had a person.  Considering the nature of my experiences, this was never likely.   But I considered two friends who had come to my aid last month when they didn't need to, who had never harmed me, or caused me to shrink back.  But people are fickle and people change, especially beyond the context of one particular moment. I didn't want to hang my hat there. So I said, no, I couldn't think of anyone either.

What about in fiction or films? she said, but I thought: No.  They just don't feel real enough.

I had done some work with Internal Family Systems on my own. One identifies often  "parts" of yourself. that are really behaviour, thought or I supposed even physical patterns that evolve to serve particular situations. I am not sure how you are supposed to do it, but I imagined my parts as people with obviously dominant characteristics.  These patterns can get stuck and loop or trigger when they don't need to, preventing a healthy evolution.  I have, for example, unsurprisingly a  strong "watcher" or vigilant part.

I hadn't read too much about IFS because I hadn't wanted to influence my experiencing of it. Several of my own "parts" stand in relation to something like an outdoor fire circle. At the focal point of this fire was a centred, grounded, wise part who I was surprised to eventually understand was also a part of me. Apparently it is the core self. I wasn't sure if this was what the therapist wanted or rather something outside of me. She asked about the colour of this part, the relevance of which I haven't yet explored.

At this point, I realised I had no safe place, nor person.  Since my body, this mandatory housing I inhabit, had let me down or alarmed me repeatedly over the last year, that  didn't feel safe either.  

In the next session the therapaist realised that nature for me is a great solace and counselled not to underestimate that power. My backyard is a small, north facing area of small stones on concrete but over the last few years about a hundred species have decided, upon my scattering wild seed I find in late summer, to make this place their home. It might sound mawkish to say I greet my plants, each time I come home or leave home but I do have some sort of communing with them, much like anyone who walks around a garden. Dad's first enthusiasm, on my arriving at their house, was for me to accompany him on a walk around his garden so he could point out the changes.

So I acknowledge the plants, which I do not consider "mine". I see them, stop and pause, notice them, give them my attention, recall their changes, consider what they might need, whether they are starting to be thuggish or failing to thrive.  As I see their changes and what they are doing and drink in their beauty, really, the miracle of their existence, what they have come from, the specific site in which a seed became a plant, I will also hear the buzz of an insect or the soft brush of a bird's wing in the undergrowth. These things give me a profound sense of peace and pleasure and presence, which I suppose is a kind of safety.