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

Polls close for byelections in Montreal and Winnipeg

Published

1 hour ago

September 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

The NDP has a slight early lead in Winnipeg while remaining in a three-way race with the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois in Montreal as ballots continue to be counted in two crucial federal byelections.

Laura Palestini, the Liberal candidate in the party’s Montreal stronghold of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, gave a speech thanking her volunteers just a little over an hour after the polls closed and early results showed her trailing in third spot.

The NDP are so far also holding on to their own seat in the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood — Transcona. The first 7,210 ballots reported by Elections Canada show 48.1per cent of votes have gone to the NDP and 43.8 per cent to the Conservatives, with the vast majority of votes yet to be counted.

While byelections aren’t usually credited with much significance on Parliament Hill, the votes in Winnipeg and Montreal are being treated as bellwethers of the political shifts happening in Canada.

The Elmwood — Transcona seat has been vacant since the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie left federal politics.

The New Democrats are hoping to hold onto the riding and polls suggest the Conservatives are in the running.

LaSalle—Émard—Verdun opened up when former justice minister David Lametti left politics.

Polls suggested the race was tight between the Liberal candidate and the Bloc Québécois, but the NDP were hopeful it could win.

Palestini thanked her volunteers as the results rolled in Monday night.

“Thanks to your efforts, our message resonated,” she said in French at a Liberal gathering in Dilallo Burger, a Ville-Émard institution dating back to 1929.

“Perhaps tomorrow morning, early, we will hear what the people of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun want as their member of parliament.”

She departed shortly after.

Meanwhile at the NDP headquarters, cries of joy erupted as the first poll results were showed.

Montrealer Graham Juneau said that despite all the campaigning, he and many of his friends are “relatively disengaged.”

He opted to vote for no one, to make a point about “a lack of confidence in the political establishment in Canada.”

“At least amongst my peers, there hasn’t been a groundswell of enthusiasm for any of the particular parties,” he said.

Liberal ministers have visited the area several times as the party worked hard to keep the riding it has held for decades.

Ahead of the results, Liam Olsen, a volunteer with the Young Liberals of Canada, said he was feeling optimistic.

He had travelled to Montreal from Ottawa to knock on doors on byelection day.

“It’s going to be a close one,” he said.

“Unpredictable things can happen. But definitely good vibes at the doors today.”

Outside the headquarters of the Bloc Québécois in Verdun, volunteer Sarah Plante, 21, said she was feeling similarly confident.

A Bloc victory in Montreal would prove that the Bloc has a place in Montreal and would send a “strong message” to the federal government that the party represents the interests of all Quebecers, she said.

The stakes are particularly high for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faced calls for his resignation last June when the Conservatives took over a Liberal stronghold seat in a Toronto byelection.

The loss sent shock waves through the governing party, as the Liberals were faced with the stark reality of their plummeting poll numbers.

C.B. Singh, an 85-year-old Montrealer who has been volunteering for the Liberals since Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister, said he still supports Justin Trudeau.

“I know his father, so I’m for him,” he said. “He is still popular among the immigrants.”

Some strategists have suggested that Jagmeet Singh’s leadership could come under similar scrutiny if the NDP fails to hold onto the Winnipeg seat.

As early results rolled in there were cheers from supporters in the NDP camp in Winnipeg.

Singh took a political gamble on signing a pact with Trudeau in 2022 to prevent an early election in exchange for progress on NDP priorities.

While that deal has yielded a national dental care program, legislation to ban replacement workers and a bill that would underpin a future pharmacare program, the results haven’t translated to gains in the polls.

Singh pulled out of that deal just weeks ago in a bid to distance his party from the Liberals and try to make the next election a two-way race between himself and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

The Conservatives have made an aggressive play for the riding by appealing to traditional NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.

“Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau are the same person,” Poilievre said in a social media video posted Sunday ahead of Monday’s vote.

A vote for the Conservative candidate in Elmwood — Transcona is a vote to “fire Justin Trudeau and axe the tax,” he said.

Elections Canada warned on social media Monday evening that the results in the Montreal riding could take longer than usual to be counted because of the record number of candidates.

There are 91 names on the ballot, making it the longest list in the history of federal elections. Most are affiliated with a group protesting Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system.

“Results will be available tonight or early tomorrow. Thank you for your patience,” Elections Canada said on X Monday.

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

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Politics

Manitoba NDP removes backbencher from caucus over Nygard link

Published

9 hours ago

September 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

WINNIPEG – A backbencher with Manitoba’s NDP government has been removed from caucus over his link to convicted sex offender Peter Nygard.

Caucus chair Mike Moyes says it learned early Monday that a business partner of Mark Wasyliw is acting as Nygard’s criminal defence lawyer.

Moyes says Wasyliw was notified of the decision.

“Wasyliw’s failure to demonstrate good judgment does not align with our caucus principles of mutual respect and trust,” Moyes said in a statement.

“As such MLA Wasyliw can no longer continue his role in our caucus.”

Nygard, who founded a fashion empire in Winnipeg, was sentenced earlier this month to 11 years in prison for sexually assaulting four women at his company’s headquarters in Toronto.

The 83-year-old continues to face charges in Manitoba, Quebec and the United States.

Moyes declined to say whether Wasyliw would be sitting as an Independent.

The legislature member for Fort Garry was first elected in 2019. Before the NDP formed government in 2023, Wasyliw served as the party’s finance critic.

He previously came under fire from the Opposition Progressive Conservatives for continuing to work as a lawyer while serving in the legislature.

At the time, Wasyliw told the Winnipeg Free Press that he was disappointed he wasn’t named to cabinet and planned to continue working as a defence lawyer.

Premier Wab Kinew objected to Wasyliw’s decision, saying elected officials should focus on serving the public.

There were possible signs of tension between Wasyliw and Kinew last fall. Wasyliw didn’t shake hands with the new premier after being sworn into office. Other caucus members shook Kinew’s hand, hugged or offered a fist bump.

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

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Politics

Tensions, rhetoric abound as MPs return to House of Commons, spar over carbon price

Published

11 hours ago

September 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

OTTAWA – Liberal House leader Karina Gould lambasted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as a “fraudster” Monday morning after he said the federal carbon price is going to cause a “nuclear winter.”

Gould was speaking just before the House of Commons is set to reopen following the summer break. Monday is the first sitting since the end of an agreement that had the NDP insulate the Liberals from the possibility of a snap election, one the Conservatives are eager to trigger.

With the prospect of a confidence vote that could send Canadians to the polls, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet cast doubt on how long MPs will be sitting in the House of Commons.

“We are playing chicken with four cars. Eventually, one will eat another one, and there will be a wreckage. So, I’m not certain that this session will last a very long time,” Blanchet told reporters on Monday.

On Sunday Poilievre said increasing the carbon price will cause a “nuclear winter,” painting a dystopian picture of people starving and freezing because they can’t afford food or heat due the carbon price.

He said the Liberals’ obsession with carbon pricing is “an existential threat to our economy and our way of life.”

The carbon price currently adds about 17.6 cents to every litre of gasoline, but that cost is offset by carbon rebates mailed to Canadians every three months.

The Parliamentary Budget Office provided analysis that showed eight in 10 households receive more from the rebates than they pay in carbon pricing, though the office also warned that long-term economic effects could harm jobs and wage growth.

Gould accused Poilievre of ignoring the rebates, and refusing to tell Canadians how he would make life more affordable while battling climate change.

“What I heard yesterday from Mr. Poilievre was so over the top, so irresponsible, so immature, and something that only a fraudster would do,” Gould said from Parliament Hill.

The Liberals have also accused the Conservatives of dismissing the expertise of more than 200 economists who wrote a letter earlier this year describing the carbon price as the least expensive, most efficient way to lower emissions.

Poilievre is pushing for the other opposition parties to vote the government down and trigger what he calls a “carbon tax election.”

Despite previously supporting the consumer carbon price, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has been distancing himself from the policy.

Singh wouldn’t say last week whether an NDP government would keep the consumer carbon price. On Monday, he told reporters Canadians were already “doing their part” to fight climate change, but that big polluters are getting a “free ride.”

He said the New Democrats will focus this fall on affordability issues like housing and grocery costs, arguing the Liberals and Conservatives are beholden to big business.

“Their governments have been in it for CEOs and big corporations,” he told reporters Monday on Parliament Hill.

Poilievre intends to bring a non-confidence motion against the government as early as this week but would likely need both the Bloc and NDP to support it. Neither have indicated an appetite for triggering an election.

Gould said she has no “crystal ball” over when or how often Poilievre might try to bring down the government.

“I know that the end of the supply and confidence agreement makes things a bit different, but really all it does is returns us to a normal minority parliament,” she said.

“That means that we will work case-by-case, legislation-by-legislation with whichever party wants to work with us,” she said, adding she’s already been in touch with colleagues in other parties to “make Parliament work for Canadians.”

The Liberals said at their caucus retreat last week that they would be sharpening their attacks on Poilievre this fall, seeking to reverse his months-long rise in the polls.

Freeland suggested she had no qualms with criticizing Poilievre’s rhetoric while having a colleague call him a fraudster.

She said Monday that the Liberals must “be really clear with Canadians about what the Conservative Party is saying, about what it is standing for — and about the veracity, or not, of the statements of the Conservative leader.”

Meanwhile, Gould insisted the government has listened to the concerns raised by Canadians, and received the message when the Liberals were defeated in a Toronto byelection in June, losing a seat the party had held since 1997.

“We certainly got the message from Toronto-St. Paul’s and have spent the summer reflecting on what that means and are coming back to Parliament, I think, very clearly focused on ensuring that Canadians are at the centre of everything that we do moving forward,” she said.

The Liberals are bracing, however, for the possibility of another blow Monday night, in a tight race to hold a Montreal seat in a byelection there. Voters in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun are casting ballots today to replace former justice minister David Lametti, who was removed from cabinet in 2023 and resigned as an MP in January.

The Conservatives and NDP are also in a tight race in Elmwood-Transcona, a Winnipeg seat that has mostly been held by the NDP over the last several decades.

There are several key bills making their way through the legislative process, including the online harms act and the NDP-endorsed pharmacare bill, which is currently in the Senate.

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

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