Transcriber: Jiwon Lee Reviewer: Marina Naguib
Rakeem has terminal cancer.
Alicia’s graduation was cancelled due to COVID.
My dear friend just suffered her fourth miscarriage in four years.
As a social worker and empathy educator,
I've had the privilege of holding pain for so many people,
And doing so has taught me some rich truths about humanity.
For one, trauma is not comparable.
Trauma is a living creature with a lot of components.
It creates physiological responses in us,
As Dr. Bessel van der Beek and others have expertly documented,
It can shape entirely how we see the world.
As trauma specialists have explained, it comes in diagnosable forms.
It can seem innocuous at first.
It repeats itself through generations, but no matter how it comes, it comes.
The statements that I just made are all traumatic events in the lives of Rakeem,
Alicia and my friend. How they thought everything would be is different,
Disrupted, changed, rewritten the degree,
The level of pain and disruption may be different,
But the presence of pain and disruption is universal.
However, we do as humans often rush to compare trauma against trauma
And create a sort of hierarchy of suffering. This manifests in two ways.
First, you have ‘minimizing’. “Oh, it’s not like you have cancer or anything,
Or “it’s not that bad.”
This can calcify the pain in someone’s life,
And they could not seek healing,
And it just kind of hang out and continue to hurt them.
The second is a need to compete in the suffering Olympics.
“Oh, you think you have it bad? Oh, that is nothing compared to.”
Whatever route you choose, the result is the same.
Paralysis instead of processing.
There is a different way.
As I’ve talked about trauma over the years,
One of the loudest complaints and push backs that
I have gotten is people believing that I am saying all trauma is the same.
So let me be super clear, I am not saying that at all.
Losing your entire family in a civil war is not the same
As getting stood up at prom.
Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes and happens throughout our lives.
I am not saying that trauma is interchangeable.
I'm saying that trauma is incomparable.
Trauma is kind of an inevitable part of this whole human thing.
To quote and adapt Ben Franklin’s quip,
Death, taxes and trauma are all inevitable parts of what it means to be
A person, and very few of us have or really any of us have any control
As to kind of how it reshapes us.
And honestly, sometimes when you share your pain with somebody,
When you bare your soul and their response is suck it up.
Or maybe it's what God wanted for you.
Sometimes that's more painful than the event itself.
What matters in terms of trauma isn't international context
Or historical context or your context or anything.
What matters is, is how it affects the person, how it rewrites their lives,
Overwrites their nervous system, changes how they see the world.
What matters is their pain, whatever degree it is.
But as I already mentioned,
We do kind of rush to categorize it against other pain,
To give it context to help people put it in perspective.
And often we're doing that out of an impetus to help.
Well, surely if they can kind of see they’re not ready for that yet.
Context is important, and perspective is a mandatory part of healing,
But it is not the priority at the point of pain.
At the point of the share, the priority is simply to acknowledge their pain.
A common refrain in this hierarchical- ization of trauma is something along
The lines of suck it up, you’re not a starving child in Africa.
Ninety nine percent of the time that that phrase is wielded as
A weapon of minimization, it’s factual.
The person is, in fact, not a starving African child.
100 percent of the time, it's completely useless.
What does being an extreme poverty have to do with being in pain?
And if someone is really hungry, does none of their other pain matter?
What about the mother who enters into an abusive sexual relationship
Because the abuser will feed her children? Comparing her traumas is unproductive.
What we think of someone else's trauma does not matter.
What matters is how we respond when they hand us their pain.
Poet Mary Oliver wrote, Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness,
It took me years to understand that it too was a gift.
What if we understood that?
What if we understood this disclosure as a gift of trust?
What if we could pay attention to their body language, their tone of voice,
The things they’re not saying,
All of that other stuff that comes with storytelling?
What if we paid attention to that and let that guide the context?
Because there is context that's important in this situation, but it's not ours.
It's theirs. Their context is what matters.
When she was twenty five years old,
A young woman was fired from her volunteer job.
This may not seem like a traumatic event based on that statement alone,
So allow me to unpack.
She had been working as a youth worker at a church
For about two years when it happened.
She was pulled into a meeting with several members of staff
And told that she was a damaging and harmful presence
In the lives of their youth.
Direct quote.
She was told she was never allowed to see any of the students again,
Even if she ran into them in public, like at a Target,
They asked her to walk away.
She found out that they'd been collating and curating
A list of grievances against her for an entire year.
Then, with some input from parents, staff members, some of her fellow volunteers.
But she was never given a chance to respond to the charges against her,
Because they wouldn’t even show her the list.
To say that she was blindsided is
An understatement. At that point in her life,
She had been in training to be a youth worker for 10 years,
Had been one, in fact, for 10 years,
And was trying to make it her entire life’s work.
These people, this action, this meeting didn't just strip her of an activity.
It decimated her identity.
She fled the meeting, feeling both numb and shattered,
Had no idea what end was up.
And she sought emotional refuge first from a man who had been family
For her in the past. He was so supportive,
Assuring her that she would find another calling, that she would heal,
That life would be great. He was a true team mate until five days later.
When he responded to one of her pained questions with a dismissive eye roll.
Asked her why she was being so dramatic,
Told her that she would get over it and that she was making too big a deal.
If you had punched her in the sternum, it would have been less painful.
And I know that for sure, because that’s sternum is mine.
That story is mine.
And I want something different for all of us.
Not just because we deserve it, but because society demands it.
In the last 18-ish months,
The world has come to understand trauma in a brand new way.
I mean, none of us have lived through a global pandemic before.
And this one is both firmly personal and fundamentally communal.
It has affected all of us in different ways emotionally, physically, socially,
Economically, spiritually,
The whole nine and will continue to do so for generations.
What if instead of playing judge and jury on someone’s covid experience?
What if we told them we're sorry that they're in pain? What if we listened?
What if we accepted their truth as a gift?
What if Alicia, whose graduation was cancelled due to COVID?
What if I told you that she was
The very first person in her entire village to graduate from high school?
For decades, the entire community of undocumented persons did everything they
Could to make sure that she would get that diploma,
And she counted her process of doing that as much of theirs as hers.
For Alicia, graduation wasn’t a party,
It was acknowledging her place in the community
And their labor towards her life.
If we knew that, would we count her tears differently?
And if we knew that, would we see her differently, maybe even know her better?
Because the point of all of this reframing of trauma is this.
That we can know each other better, we can treat each other with more respect,
More empathy and move from a world fractured with assumptions
To a world cohesive with love.
There's an adage that's attributed to Plato,
You may have heard that goes like this: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting
A harder battle. I’d like to offer this edit.
Be kind, for everyone you meet, has scars from battles that they have fought,
Is in training for battles they will fight and don’t know about yet
And do not need you to tell them that those battles aren’t valid.
It doesn't fit on an Instagram graphic, I know,
But sometimes more words are better.
So I beseech you all to remember that comparing trauma against trauma only
Causes more trauma.
When faced with the gift of someone’s pain, I ask you,
I urge you, I invite you to treat it like that and understand that
The response that is necessary is listening without judgment
And maybe sometimes a hug.
If trauma is part of the human experience,
We’ve got to make healing part of it as well.
We want to move from that world that’s fractured with assumptions
To one cohesive with love. We absolutely can. That’s the great news.
We absolutely can do that. We have all the tools we need.
We just have to decide that we want to.
(Applause)