By Lorraine Caputo, LCSW 

It’s hard for me to feel part of the current period of collective trauma that we are all living through. My own ring of hell is certainly difficult, lonely and isolated, but it is also comfortable, safe, and warm. Rather than the freezer truck full of dead bodies observed by one of my patients who lives near a NYC hospital, I get to look at pretty houses and beautiful tall trees from the refuge of my home office. Instead of carefully making my way into an ICU unit every day suited up in PPE armor enabling me to approach and save dying patients, I treat my own patients through the cyber distance and sterility of the Zoom camera. I have a job and an income to pay the bills—unlike my young patient of color, a talented theater performing artist struggling to find projects to keep herself and the larger theater world going for a hopeful return to work once this is all over—and also unlike the thousands standing in line at food banks all over the country.  

And yet, of course I do feel a piece of this collective nightmare. I experience the anxiety, loss, and palpable fatigue in the questions: When will this ever end? When will we go back to normal? Will I or someone I love get sick and die. While I have not become sick, I have patients and friends who have had Covid and their family members have died from it.  But to deny that this has been a most difficult year for me would be to disavow the world’s suffering by repudiating my own pain and my part in it. Building a narrative and bearing witness to the minutes, hours, and days of the last year’s uncertainty, frustration and anger—not to mention our patients’ anxieties and steep descent into old forgotten places of doom, hopelessness and fear—is important in more ways than one.  

It’s easy to “other” defensively. The initial tendency of politicians and journalists to report that communities of color were dying at higher rates of Covid because they were more susceptible due to underlying health conditions was much easier than looking closer at neighborhoods, resources and commutes to jobs that require showing up in person—jobs in healthcare, food service and other frontline essential labor putting them directly in harm’s way. Denying one’s own vulnerability in such a traumatic world is to deny the experience of others by placing them “over there,” as “not-me”, believing “that cannot happen to me,” which in essence lessens one’s ability to mentalize the pain of another through the act of othering—locking oneself even more into a place of privilege and comfort. But what a false sense of comfort that is.

As we have observed over the last four years, our government attempted to deny any connection to the pain of others, disavowing the reality of the dying due to Covid, ignoring the mounting catastrophe of climate change and turning a blind eye to overt, relentless racism. Change has come in our new president and vice president, but irreversible damage and death has occurred to living, breathing humans because of a great disavowal.  

In When the Third is Dead, Sam Gerson (2009) discusses the death of the Societal Third when a government that does not witness, recognize or respond to reality, and people are left to feel abandoned and objectified.  “The imperatives to bear witness and the seductions of blind denial” are in constant oscillation (Gerson, 2009) during Covid, and in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, and in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. 

CORE (Manhattan Institute’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity) has given us all an opportunity in this time of trauma to bear witness and to avoid the seduction of blind denial. The collective trauma of racism—what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others before and after them—has revealed a wound that has never healed in this country. We are all affected by such violence and within the context of Covid, we know that the virus has affected more people of color and low-income communities the most, and we also know why.

Our past as a country haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living and the dead who are still with us; their narratives must be heard and witnessed.

In Dialogues (a bi-monthly, open group of MIP community members organized and hosted by CORE to process racialized dynamics in the mixed race space) we explore how the past haunts the present. We look at those disavowed moments in our relationships that reflect the larger disavowed moments in the history of our country, the largely ignored pain that our friends, colleagues and citizens of our country live with every day, and relive over and over again.  

Those of us who lived through the pain of racism, race riots and civil rights marches in the ‘60s and ‘70s have felt a sense of déjà vu, and we wonder if this heightened time of consciousness will be different. We were all witness to a black man being murdered by a police officer on screen for eight minutes and 46 seconds, knee to neck, an unmistakable act of depravity and objectification of the dying man under his knee. His death collapsed the past of our country’s racism into the present of another black man’s death. Stolorow suggests that “temporality—the sense of stretching along between past and future—that is devastatingly disturbed by the experience of emotional trauma” (2007, p. 20). Stolorow’s idea that emotional trauma shatters “…the ‘absolutisms’ that allow one to experience one’s world as stable, predictable, and safe” echoes loudly in this time of collective trauma. Time, stability and safety have changed for all of us during Covid and during the social upheaval which has been entwined with the Covid crisis.

Dialogues has been a way of bearing witness to the racism we have all lived in all of these years, down through the ages. We cannot be silent or disconnected from what has seeped into our pores, into our minds and into our souls as a result of the exclusion of people of color from our psyches as we go about our day, business as usual, as if it’s only their pain and their anguish—not ours. As our colleague and friend June Kim poignantly said in one of the Dialogues meetings: “Racism is the water we swim in together.” 

Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememorization” has always been a haunting concept to me. She defines rememorization as: “the not there … and all that is forgotten and left out of neighborhoods and homes and people’s minds and memories … a haunting memorial of what has been excluded, excised, evicted and for that very reason becomes the unheimlich space for the negotiation of identity and history. There are choices that generations make about what to keep and what to forget…” (Morrison in Bhabha, 1994, pp. 284–302). In Dialogues, we are making the choice to examine what we deny, forget and excise from our hearts and minds. We know from our work as analysts that what we have forgotten and left out of our memories and thoughts can only lead to more pain and suffering.  

 

Lorraine Caputo, LCSW is the Director of the Certificate Program in Trauma Studies at MIP, in private practice in Manhattan and in Maplewood, New Jersey. 

 

References:

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge. 

Gerson, S. (2009). When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust.  Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90:1341–1357.

Stolorow, Robert D. (2007).  Trauma and Human Existence. New York, The Analytic Press.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, we recommend:

Spotlight on CORE: Part I featuring an interview with Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, and Chanda Griffin, LCSW

Spotlight on CORE, Part II: Voices from Dialogues by Wendy Greenspun, Ph.D., and Roberto Colangeli, Ph.D., LP