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 trauma 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: If you think of a flowering rose, you could not call it such if it hadn’t bloomed. It would be a rose bush or it would be qualified in some way.  If we point to a rose plant and say "this is a rose" what we mean is "this will become a rose".  I have changed from thinking 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 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.

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.  While philosophically controversial, those ideas of a self and of agency tend to be accepted as a pre-requisite for living in the Western world.

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 you into a smaller and smaller space. They create a maze with cul-de-sacs at every turn. Your world is not yours to manage. Your world is controlled by their 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’s 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 for me, 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. It 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 a controlled entity. It's 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 and to be oneself.