Politics

The politics of trauma – Open Democracy

Published

4 years ago

August 11, 2020

Fresh from a zoom meeting with the Working Families Party and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, I’m feeling heartened, fired up and grateful. What would America look like if all our communities had what they needed? Where would resources be prioritized if the Breathe Act proposed by the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project guided our policies? Who would we need to become, and what would we need to embody?

That final question is important because justice and injustice are lodged deep inside our bodies, thinking and habits, so engaging that mind-body connection is crucial to realizing the future that we want. A number of techniques have been developed to help us do this, including ‘Somatics,’ which I’ve been learning about, working in and teaching for the last 25 years.

Somatics is a mind/body methodology that supports deep personal change, trauma healing, and embodying new practices for individuals and groups. The aim is to align our skills and capacities, ways of being and relating, and actions with our values and visions, even under pressure. For Somatics this is the test: how do we think, act and relate from what we most care about, including in the most challenging of circumstances, rather than reacting from what is familiar and accepted?

For predictable reasons, we tend to resort back to our habits, training and survival strategies when we’re under stress. Somatics helps us to understand how the mind and body function as an integrated system to develop these habits through practice over time. We learn these practices through our families, communities, and the economic and social conditions in which we live and work, often ending up embodying oppressive social conditions or our reactions to them even when we don’t believe in them.

Somatics and other transformative approaches are powerful in their ability to lessen suffering, heal trauma, strengthen our capacity to love and be loved, increase our courage, and improve our ability to envision a different future and challenge oppression together. Generative Somatics, an organization I co-founded, has worked with thousands of social justice and climate justice leaders over the last decade to help them excavate trauma, oppression and privilege from the recesses in which they’re stored.

For example, we’ve partnered with the National Domestic Workers Alliance for many years in their leadership development programs. The Alliance organizes domestic workers and their allies in support of domestic workers’ rights. Domestic work is the ‘work that let’s all other work happen,’ like caring for children, keeping homes clean and functioning, and caring for the elderly while others go to work.

Through Somatics we explored the automatic reactions and default practices of these leaders, and how they affected the movement’s work and impact. As is understandable, many domestic workers – especially under pressure – appease or look to smooth over conflicts, especially with their employers. These are good survival strategies in navigating the conditions they experience like economic migration, poverty, racism, and expectations that stem from gender oppression. But they’re not the most useful skills for organizing, talking with politicians, or street actions – the kinds of things that are required to build an effective movement.

The training provided an opportunity for embodied transformation, healing, and learning new habits individually and collectively – like storytelling, how to have useful conflict with each other to further their strategies, and to be cared for as they care for others.

As with these domestic workers, under stress or threat our mind/body reacts in predictable ways. We tighten up or go slack, and move toward the pressure or away from it. We puff ourselves up or look to fight. We check out or appease. We adapt to find safety, belonging, and dignity. Somatics understands these things to be inherent needs for all people.

When our relationships or the environment around us become threatening or violent, we engage automatic mind/body survival reactions like fight, flight, freeze, appease and checking out. We don’t think about these reactions or plan them because they bypass the conscious mind so that we can react sufficiently quickly. But these same reactions then become generalized patterns of behavior, living in our neurons, muscles and tissues and affecting how we think and act in our work for liberation.

For example, one of the people I work with is a cis-gendered, queer, white woman and racial justice organizer. She was raised Mormon and working class, and was sexually abused as a child. When she came forward about this abuse as a young adult, her family and community turned against her, and threatened her with exile unless she recanted.

This represented a profound loss on top of the abuse and silencing she had already experienced. What was happening for her somatically? Her survival strategies told her to shrink and take up less room, to cast her eyes down automatically and let others have the final say – to assume that if she became empowered she would be isolated. Her chest was collapsed in towards her spine, shoulders curled, and she seemed to be backing away even when she wasn’t moving. Her body communicated appeasement and apology.

While these are all understandable survival strategies given her past experiences, they don’t serve her current leadership role, relationships or values. If someone pushes hard enough against her or disagrees loudly enough with her opinions, these same embodied habits rush to the foreground and take over. As she told me, she often feels at odds with herself, as if she were betraying her social justice work, because her reactions weren’t building trust with the people of color and communities that she’s committed to in her organizing work.

Oppressive social and economic conditions define, on a vast scale, who is given safety, belonging and dignity, and who isn’t. Why is Black Lives Matter such a radical call? Because it’s a call for the safety, belonging, and dignity of peoples for whom these things have been systemically denied since the beginning of the USA.

In turn, white people have embodied, through their own social and economic conditions, the experience that their (perceived) safety, belonging and dignity is based on racial domination and the centering of whiteness, assuming that “white” is the defining norm, the standard setter, the decider. That means that we’ve a lot of embodied transformation to do, along with enacting the necessary policy changes and a radical re-envisioning of the economy.

Methodologies that address embodiment are becoming increasingly popular in both the mainstream and in transformative social movements. But, like most coaching, consulting, mindfulness training and therapeutic approaches, Somatics, up until now, has been a primarily de-politicized field, with little or no social analysis of power, systemic oppression or privilege, and the profound impact they have on people, communities and the planet.

The focus is usually on the individual, or in some cases, a team or an organization. The outcomes of transformation, while often profound for those who have access to them, tend to be defined by social conditions that are built on dominance and accumulation: becoming more successful (i.e. wealthier and more powerful), less stressed (to keep the bottom line increasing), happier (for yourself but not necessarily for others), and more peaceful – caring about the world but not letting it disturb you too much.

These mainstream approaches often encourage practitioners to use the skills they learn to improve and advance themselves, and since the jobs that pay the most are in the corporate sector and government, challenging the drive for profit becomes counterproductive. Transformation is then used to support racial capitalism, so who uses these methods, and to what ends, are vital questions.

Embodied transformation should be inherently linked to collective action for equity, well-being and a sustainable future. Healing and social action should be inseparable, so using transformative work to uplift social justice leaders, making it accessible to them, and supporting their leadership in the field, are priorities. What does it take to embody justice personally? What does it take for masses of people to embody justice? The processes that create personal transformation and those that create social and economic transformation are distinct but interdependent.

Because we have embodied, and been shaped by, social and economic systems built on exercising power over others and over nature, we need to transform these experiences and develop collective practices that grow from a premise of interdependence. We can do this by integrating a deep social analysis and an understanding of the costs of racial capitalism and white supremacy into processes of transformative change. This is what Somatics with a social analysis aims to do.

Through powerful methods like these we can change our embodied practices to align with liberatory values. Healing can support the collective reckoning required to face how violence and oppression are baked into ourselves, our bodies and our relationships. Somatics can name and explore social oppression and privilege, and purposefully link personal change to collective action for liberation. Either we transform ourselves on purpose or we are defined by our circumstances.

Staci K. Haines’ new book is The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice.

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Politics

Review finds no case for formal probe of Beijing’s activities under elections law

Published

1 day ago

September 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

OTTAWA – The federal agency that investigates election infractions found insufficient evidence to support suggestions Beijing wielded undue influence against the Conservatives in the Vancouver area during the 2021 general election.

The Commissioner of Canada Elections’ recently completed review of the lingering issue was tabled Tuesday at a federal inquiry into foreign interference.

The review focused on the unsuccessful campaign of Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu in the riding of Steveston-Richmond East and the party’s larger efforts in the Vancouver area.

It says the evidence uncovered did not trigger the threshold to initiate a formal investigation under the Canada Elections Act.

Investigators therefore recommended that the review be concluded.

A summary of the review results was shared with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP. The review says both agencies indicated the election commissioner’s findings were consistent with their own understanding of the situation.

During the exercise, the commissioner’s investigators met with Chinese Canadian residents of Chiu’s riding and surrounding ones.

They were told of an extensive network of Chinese Canadian associations, businesses and media organizations that offers the diaspora a lifestyle that mirrors that of China in many ways.

“Further, this diaspora has continuing and extensive commercial, social and familial relations with China,” the review says.

Some interviewees reported that this “has created aspects of a parallel society involving many Chinese Canadians in the Lower Mainland area, which includes concerted support, direction and control by individuals from or involved with China’s Vancouver consulate and the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in China.”

Investigators were also made aware of members of three Chinese Canadian associations, as well as others, who were alleged to have used their positions to influence the choice of Chinese Canadian voters during the 2021 election in a direction favourable to the interests of Beijing, the review says.

These efforts were sparked by elements of the Conservative party’s election platform and by actions and statements by Chiu “that were leveraged to bolster claims that both the platform and Chiu were anti-China and were encouraging anti-Chinese discrimination and racism.”

These messages were amplified through repetition in social media, chat groups and posts, as well as in Chinese in online, print and radio media throughout the Vancouver area.

Upon examination, the messages “were found to not be in contravention” of the Canada Elections Act, says the review, citing the Supreme Court of Canada’s position that the concept of uninhibited speech permeates all truly democratic societies and institutions.

The review says the effectiveness of the anti-Conservative, anti-Chiu campaigns was enhanced by circumstances “unique to the Chinese diaspora and the assertive nature of Chinese government interests.”

It notes the election was prefaced by statements from China’s ambassador to Canada and the Vancouver consul general as well as articles published or broadcast in Beijing-controlled Chinese Canadian media entities.

“According to Chinese Canadian interview subjects, this invoked a widespread fear amongst electors, described as a fear of retributive measures from Chinese authorities should a (Conservative) government be elected.”

This included the possibility that Chinese authorities could interfere with travel to and from China, as well as measures being taken against family members or business interests in China, the review says.

“Several Chinese Canadian interview subjects were of the view that Chinese authorities could exercise such retributive measures, and that this fear was most acute with Chinese Canadian electors from mainland China. One said ‘everybody understands’ the need to only say nice things about China.”

However, no interview subject was willing to name electors who were directly affected by the anti-Tory campaign, nor community leaders who claimed to speak on a voter’s behalf.

Several weeks of public inquiry hearings will focus on the capacity of federal agencies to detect, deter and counter foreign meddling.

In other testimony Tuesday, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis told the inquiry that parliamentarians who were targeted by Chinese hackers could have taken immediate protective steps if they had been informed sooner.

It emerged earlier this year that in 2021 some MPs and senators faced cyberattacks from the hackers because of their involvement with the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which pushes for accountability from Beijing.

In 2022, U.S. authorities apparently informed the Canadian government of the attacks, and it in turn advised parliamentary IT officials — but not individual MPs.

Genuis, a Canadian co-chair of the inter-parliamentary alliance, told the inquiry Tuesday that it remains mysterious to him why he wasn’t informed about the attacks sooner.

Liberal MP John McKay, also a Canadian co-chair of the alliance, said there should be a clear protocol for advising parliamentarians of cyberthreats.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.

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Politics

NDP beat Conservatives in federal byelection in Winnipeg

Published

1 day ago

September 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

WINNIPEG – The federal New Democrats have kept a longtime stronghold in the Elmwood-Transcona riding in Winnipeg.

The NDP’s Leila Dance won a close battle over Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds, and says the community has spoken in favour of priorities such as health care and the cost of living.

Elmwood-Transcona has elected a New Democrat in every election except one since the riding was formed in 1988.

The seat became open after three-term member of Parliament Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to take a job with the Manitoba government.

A political analyst the NDP is likely relieved to have kept the seat in what has been one of their strongest urban areas.

Christopher Adams, an adjunct professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba, says NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh worked hard to keep the seat in a tight race.

“He made a number of visits to Winnipeg, so if they had lost this riding it would have been disastrous for the NDP,” Adams said.

The strong Conservative showing should put wind in that party’s sails, Adams added, as their percentage of the popular vote in Elmwood-Transcona jumped sharply from the 2021 election.

“Even though the Conservatives lost this (byelection), they should walk away from it feeling pretty good.”

Dance told reporters Monday night she wants to focus on issues such as the cost of living while working in Ottawa.

“We used to be able to buy a cart of groceries for a hundred dollars and now it’s two small bags. That is something that will affect everyone in this riding,” Dance said.

Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre placed a distant third,

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024

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Politics

Trudeau says ‘all sorts of reflections’ for Liberals after loss of second stronghold

Published

1 day ago

September 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say the Liberals have “all sorts of reflections” to make after losing a second stronghold in a byelection in Montreal Monday night.

His comments come as the Liberal cabinet gathers for its first regularly scheduled meeting of the fall sitting of Parliament, which began Monday.

Trudeau’s Liberals were hopeful they could retain the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, but those hopes were dashed after the Bloc Québécois won it in an extremely tight three-way race with the NDP.

Louis-Philippe Sauvé, an administrator at the Institute for Research in Contemporary Economics, beat Liberal candidate Laura Palestini by less than 250 votes. The NDP finished about 600 votes back of the winner.

It is the second time in three months that Trudeau’s party lost a stronghold in a byelection. In June, the Conservatives defeated the Liberals narrowly in Toronto-St. Paul’s.

The Liberals won every seat in Toronto and almost every seat on the Island of Montreal in the last election, and losing a seat in both places has laid bare just how low the party has fallen in the polls.

“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win and hold (the Montreal riding), but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters ahead of this morning’s cabinet meeting.

When asked what went wrong for his party, Trudeau responded “I think there’s all sorts of reflections to take on that.”

In French, he would not say if this result puts his leadership in question, instead saying his team has lots of work to do.

Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet will hold a press conference this morning, but has already said the results are significant for his party.

“The victory is historic and all of Quebec will speak with a stronger voice in Ottawa,” Blanchet wrote on X, shortly after the winner was declared.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and his party had hoped to ride to a win in Montreal on the popularity of their candidate, city councillor Craig Sauvé, and use it to further their goal of replacing the Liberals as the chief alternative to the Conservatives.

The NDP did hold on to a seat in Winnipeg in a tight race with the Conservatives, but the results in Elmwood-Transcona Monday were far tighter than in the last several elections. NDP candidate Leila Dance defeated Conservative Colin Reynolds by about 1,200 votes.

Singh called it a “big victory.”

“Our movement is growing — and we’re going to keep working for Canadians and building that movement to stop Conservative cuts before they start,” he said on social media.

“Big corporations have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”

New Democrats recently pulled out of their political pact with the government in a bid to distance themselves from the Liberals, making the prospects of a snap election far more likely.

Trudeau attempted to calm his caucus at their fall retreat in Nanaimo, B.C, last week, and brought former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney on as an economic adviser in a bid to shore up some credibility with voters.

The latest byelection loss will put more pressure on him as leader, with many polls suggesting voter anger is more directed at Trudeau himself than at Liberal policies.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.

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