Nurturing Trauma Through Community
Nurturing Trauma Through Community
I’m absolutely thrilled to share this blog post with you all! I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to meet with this guest and to have them speak on their experience as a survivor and badass warrior in the community!
This conversation has so many wonderful nuggets of information about visions for the future and how community can truly help us in our recovery process. Connecting to the community can not only help us recover but help us thrive and work to change our culture as a whole into a space where rape and rape culture no longer exists.
My incredible guest today is Olivia Pepper. They are a star poet, a practicing mystic and ritualist, a community organizer, and a fellow survivor.
It is my personal suspicion that they are also secretly a super-gifted healer for our community.
Please welcome Olivia!
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I got to know Olivia through what I refer to as the “6 degrees of social media.” I stumbled upon their account when someone I followed reshared one of Olivia’s posts. I just had to follow their content! I highly suggest following their page. They share such beautiful tidbits of wisdom regularly. I have found much solace and validation through their content, so I know others will.
One of the major things I wanted to discuss with Olivia was the title “Survivor.” I know for me I have several relationships with this word.
On one side, when I was going through my recovery, I could see the transition from “victim” to “survivor.”
Initially, I felt I was still in the shock phase of the trauma, which then flipped into feeling like I was getting the hang of living life again. That felt more like survivorship.
I also find this term to be limiting at times. There’s so much more that I did to live through my trauma than just survive.
Survive feels passive, and I have yet to meet a single survivor who was not incredibly active and powerful in their recovery. I like that there’s a name that helps us connect with a community, but sometimes the term doesn’t feel like it fits where I am now in my life and all that it took to get here.
I asked Olivia what the term “Survivor” means to them:
Olivia:
I’ve thought about this term a lot, too, actually. I’m almost 40, and I’ve been actively processing and working with my own experiences since my teen years, so I’ve got a couple of decades under my belt. Unfortunately, I have some subsequent experiences that are kind of stacked on top of one another, so I have an identity for myself as a survivor that preceded some other traumatic events.
It was especially complicated because it felt like “survivor” was often framed as a finality. I’ve survived, and that’s it. I’m done, and nothing else will happen. Because of this, I felt like there was some stasis in the word that I’m averse to.
I do use it to describe myself because of the idea of being able to unify with other people who have similar experiences. Still, I have to recognize that in my thorny journey, I have lost some people who were trauma survivors. They could not continue that process of survival because they experienced such trauma that it ended their lives through a variety of different means.
Some of the people I want to speak for and hold in my web of care, love, and remembrance are those who didn’t have access to thriving and resiliency in the way I have. That’s why I’m hesitant to prioritize this Darwinian survival idea that somehow the “best” make it and the others don’t. That’s an association I have in my mind with that word.
Lately, I tend to think of myself as someone who has experienced trauma. That feels a little more accessible.
The term “Survivor” also feels competitive to me, which is something I want to relax around this subject.
Part of my complex trauma was the comparative struggle and the way that people perceive the aftermath. The “struggle for survival” metaphor feels a little too combat-oriented.
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Olivia is blowing up so many perspectives for me around thinking about friends and people that you know who experienced trauma but did not survive. This idea of this word and connecting with the community separates us from those who did not survive.
The term survivor creates this idea that there was something about people who survived that made them more effective and emphasizes the qualities of the individual that allowed them to survive vs. everything that goes on around them.
The burden we place on survivors is something I talk about a lot; the focus is on the individual and how they should be preventing sexual assault from happening to them and our language around rape and rape culture and how it presents itself.
Survivorship is also this sense of expectation. The media tells us precisely what a good survivor looks like, and it looks like very few of us. It ends up excluding so many survivors and their valuable stories.
We’re eliminating them from the conversation and the community altogether.
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Olivia:
A large part of my personal story and subsequent research is around this concept that I call “rape recidivism.” This concept is basically a breakdown similar to when a person gets struck by lightning; their odds of being struck again intensify. Then, if they’re struck a second time, their odds intensify even more.
In my adolescence, I experienced repeated sexual assaults, and there was so much pressure because I also understood myself as a survivor at that time. I put a tremendous amount of blame on myself without fully understanding sociological research.
There are very few rape researchers in the world because it is not a topic that people talk about enough or are prepared to interact with. The research broadly shows that people who have experienced one instance of sexual violence are likely to become victims of a second.
The individualist narrative around survivorship that surrounded me in my teens didn’t serve me because I turned it into self-blame when there were following iterations of violence in my life.
I’m cautious about emphasizing personal responsibility around trauma to expect individuals to drag themselves through the aftermath of a challenging experience and then be perfect after that.
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I love the phrase “rape recidivism,” mainly because that feels so much more neutral for the conversation around how people who suffer trauma are at a higher risk of suffering ongoing trauma.
That phrase takes the active participant component out of the conversation. It passively revokes responsibility from the person who experienced the trauma and removes the idea that they now have to somehow mitigate and carry it with them.
There’s definitely limited research on sexual assault, and I think part of it is because if we truly understood rape culture, we’d have to be willing to dismantle all other systems of oppression.
The limited research that has come out shows us that it’s perpetrators who are repeatedly committing offenses and targeting people. It’s not about the survivors.
There’s no one quality about survivors that indicates them getting assaulted multiple times. The only factor is the person who decides to target them.
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Olivia:
I participated a few years ago in a survivors' group specifically created for people who had been victimized by the same person. We all found each other and discovered many commonalities. One of them is how we had all experienced prior instances of abuse before getting involved with this man.
It was an interesting connection to find that something about his actions and behavior subconsciously netted people who had already had trauma and, therefore, were already vulnerable. We found a lot of strength in this as well.
We were all kind of targeted by this person because we had childhood trauma that conditioned us to experience an abusive relationship.
This group came about during a time in my life when I was still processing a lot of this relationship that had ended over a decade prior. Much of the trauma from this relationship was still echoing for me. It was a last-ditch effort because my typical somatic techniques and therapy weren’t working for me.
I had a gnawing frustration about this person and these instances, so I reached out to someone with whom I had a memory from this time in my life. In this memory, someone confronted my abuser at a party and said he treats women like shit. I decided to contact that person and ask what that was about. Through that, I ended up finding many women who had been victims of his abuse, so I put out a call to these women asking if they wanted to meet up in person.
We tried to collectively do something to hold him accountable because our abuser has a low level of fame in his industry. This was also concurrent with the Me Too movement, so we felt this was the time to express our experiences.
As a group, we mostly found empowerment in speaking with each other and sharing our stories. Discovering how similar our stories were was incredibly liberating. I had a lot of recollections that my brain tried to bury that all of these women also experienced.
Knowing that it wasn’t all in my head was incredibly validating.
Group Healing Process
It sounds fantastic to experience this group healing process where there was so much release of tension held around the responsibility for what happened and to clear the fog.
What I’ve been hearing from many survivors and guests that I’ve had on my podcast is how much we question our experiences and how meaningful it is to check in with people and have them affirm for us. This is why it’s so important to believe survivors. Affirmation is a key part of the healing process.
For me, it's a doorway to true recovery, being believed, and being able to believe yourself.
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Olivia:
It took a lot out of me - emotionally, energetically, spiritually - but also gave me so much. I still have one of the connections I made in that circle of people. We don’t talk a lot, and we’re not in constant contact, but this connection that I have with this individual feels like one of the most meaningful connections I’ve made in my life.
It’s so beautiful to find this interlocking sense of stabilizing, validating, uplifting, and supporting each other through this process.
When I think about restorative justice models or abolition-based approaches to confronting community issues, one of the things that I believe to be critically important is to have access to other survivors who have experienced the same abuse or abuser to be able to compare thoughts. It’s an essential part of emerging from trauma, in my opinion.
We see it, too, in family trauma. Sibling bonds can be made by discussing an issue with a parent or extended family member. It lifts that burden of secrecy and self-doubt because somebody else has experienced it.
Restorative Justice
I love the idea of weaving it into restorative justice. One of the major losses in survivorship is feeling total disconnection from everyone. For me, I had a disconnection from my body and who I was, but also from people. I wasn’t the same person anymore.
That loss of connection with other people was the hardest to deal with. It was also the most reparative one I came to find.
Part of why I became so interested in getting involved with survivors is because I found so few resources for us. Even in the huge city I live in, I could only find one group, and it had a 2-year waiting list.
Once I finally found a group on meetup.com, everything changed. It was a siblinghood of people ready to help each other. What an extraordinary intervention we could offer and facilitate as part of reparation.
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Olivia:
I ponder that as a possible future quite a lot because I think it is one of the great tragedies of rape culture. I can only speak for myself, but the incidents in my life were, of course, jarring, traumatic, tragic, and rending. I would say that I recovered from the physical side of things far before I recovered from what I would describe as the sociopolitical side of things.
I had a new understanding of myself in a different identity category than before and a feeling of being isolated in my pain, confusion, anger, and sense of loss.
Culturally, we tend to excise and hide people who are sick and hurt. I think this compounds the experience of trauma in a way that makes it hard to imagine another way, but we must. I don’t think these events would have been as troubling for me if I had a more intact, functional community to assist me afterward.
When I do this research, and I consider the history and different justice forms that have existed, one of the things that I’ve deliberated on from ethnographic research (this is relevant to me simply because I have mixed ancestry indigenous to Turtle Island and settler/colonizers) is that rape culture as we understand it didn’t exist here on Turtle Island pre-colonization. There were, of course, incidents of confusion, overstepping boundaries, or harming people in intimate, interpersonal encounters. However, community structures were in place to assist those with these negative experiences.
I’ve spoken to elders about this topic. They also explain how people knew what to do when something terrible happened between people. They knew who to go to; they’d sing them songs, bring them certain medicines, and work to reintegrate them. That is something I live with as a central pillar around remediating rape culture.
We must reach a point where we collectively know what to do when we hear about an incident.
We need to know what to do beyond simply sending someone to the hospital or jail.
Community is in our Nature
I had an ecologist friend who challenged me on this idea of how it’s “supposed” to be for people who experience severe trauma, illness, or injury. In our society, those who are severely traumatized are essentially led to the back of the pack so they can get picked off. That’s what I felt was happening in my life and what I believe happens in our culture. My friend, however, explained that pack species take their wounded, sick, and even sad members and put them in the center. They line the pack with the stronger members who are more capable of protecting, and the wounded, sick, and sad members stay in the center until they are well enough to resume their roles.
Part of what makes this so beautiful is how this is what it feels like it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to have community surround us, but there’s a shame that survivors have internalized.
Survivors are seen as burdens, and we carry this shame of being othered by society. This idea that we’re not supposed to bother people and intrude on anyone’s lives plagues us.
To hear that nature intended for us to be centered and have love, community, and care wrapped around us is inspiring. Being in the center feels almost like we’re the most valued rather than the ones cast out.
Instead of saying, “You’re ruining this for the rest of us. We’re going to let you go,” we say, “You’re so important. Let’s layer community members around you to keep you safe and well.”
It was so meaningful to hear.
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Olivia:
Some of what you’re describing echoes back nicely to my feelings of unease around the word survivor. Being pushed to the fringes or the back of the pack was also an experience I had.
We have this narrative that, to survive, you must fight your way back to the front. Of your own accord, muscle your way through the trauma and pain that you’re experiencing. This brings us back to the Darwinian idea from earlier that only the strong survive.
I can’t remember the anthropologist’s name, who I’m thinking of, but someone asked an anthropologist once what the origin of civilization was. They explained how we have this ancient fossil evidence of a healed femur bone that somebody wouldn’t have survived by themselves. There’s Neolithic evidence of someone’s leg wholly broken and able to heal, which means that their community protected them. They were able to see many more days and experience more life even after having this grievous injury because of community.
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What I love about that anecdote is that from our current white supremacy, capitalistic lense, we assume that the anthropologist will show us the first tools or ways in which these ancient people were productive. Instead, they showed us the thing that makes us feel like humans.
They showed us our humanity being demonstrated so long ago as a sign of civilization.
Something about that story makes me so proud to be a human.
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Olivia:
I agree. I feel that sense of swelling, warmth, and pride.
An alternative for the word survivor I sometimes use for myself is “Nurturer.” When I talk about “heavy gifts,” this title I’ve given myself comes to mind.
I came to this realization in a complex PTSD support group that I was part of a few years ago. Somebody posed the question, “In what ways are you grateful for the trauma you’ve been through?” I believe that my experiences have made me a more nurturing and observant person, especially toward other people who have experienced trauma or are at risk.
When I lived in Austin, TX, I put myself in the role of being part of that collective that pulls the wounded and sick back into the center. Every time I went up to a drunk woman at a bar who was stumbling and didn’t seem like she had possession of her faculties, I interacted with her to find out how she was doing, who she was with, how she was getting home, etc. That was me making sure she was in a position where the wolves couldn’t pick her off, so to speak.
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In many ways, my survivor's heart feels so much love for that simple act. That feels so heroic.
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Olivia:
I actually received a thank you letter at one point from a young woman’s family. I was driving home, and I noticed this woman who had passed out on the street extremely intoxicated. I went up to her, and she ended up having alcohol poisoning, so I took her to the hospital.
It was a strange feeling because I wondered how long she had been there, who had left her there, and who had passed by, but we ended up getting her to the hospital. Her brother and parents wrote a letter thanking me for looking after their beloved family member and expressing their gratitude to me. It was really moving and meaningful to be a part of that.
We have no way of knowing what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped to assist her, but I felt good about dedicating a little bit of my time to make sure somebody else didn’t have this hugely traumatic experience that could have happened as a result.
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It sounds like you saved her life. It’s a scary but real realization, wondering how many people saw her and did nothing. Those questions are dark but important to ask.
I want to thank Olivia for taking the time to share their beautiful knowledge and wisdom on this topic, and I truly hope that we can eventually build a beautiful world where we can have communities where survivors can get linked with each other.
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You can listen to this episode on my podcast, “Initiated Survivor.” The episode is titled “Nurturing Trauma Through Community” and is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
Thank you for reading. Until next time!
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