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missmentelle · 4 years

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So I’ve seen a bit floating around online about how this pandemic qualifies as a collective trauma and I wondered if you could speak to that. I don’t feel traumatized—I mean I’m self isolating in an apartment and it sucks and I don’t love worrying about food and my fam and friends, but is that the same thing as trauma? How would I tell? I already have depression and anxiety so that isn’t really new to me. Idk I just feel guilty going “oh I’m traumatized” when I have it pretty good, actually

A collective trauma is not just a grouping of individual traumas, and not everyone who lives through a collective trauma will be traumatized by it. When we talk about “collective trauma”, we’re talking about the ways that groups understand, process and remember that trauma as a whole, on a group level, and how that trauma becomes a part of collective identity. What defines a group trauma is not post-traumatic symptoms or individual experience, but the way that we as a group talk about that trauma, create art and traditions to commemorate that trauma, and tell our children about that trauma. You don’t personally need to live through a collective trauma in order to be a part of it; the vast majority of Jewish people alive today did not personally live through the Holocaust, but that event remains in their culture as a collective trauma that continues to play a part in their Jewish identities. Likewise, the vast majority of ethnically German people alive today did not participate in the Holocaust, but they still participate in collective trauma by finding ways to come to terms with their history and move forward with the knowledge that that is a part of their collective identity.

The idea of collective trauma is that, even if your own individual experience was outside of the norm or “easier” than most, you can still dial into the collective experience by being part of the group it happened to. The event as a whole was “yours”, as a group, and it’s meaningful to you. Those of us who aren’t Rwandan can learn about the Rwandan genocide in academic terms, by reading history books or even speaking directly to people who survived it, but it’s not “yours”. You can have sympathy for the victims and think that it’s a terrible thing that should never have happened, but it’s not your trauma. It doesn’t have personal meaning to you - it’s just a thing that happened in history. Rwandans born after 1994 have no lived experience of the genocide, but they do share in the collective trauma; the genocide is a direct part of their family’s personal story, and they have to come to terms with not only the role that their own family might have played in the genocide as victim, perpetrator or both, but they have to come to terms with what it means for Rwanda that such a terrible thing happened there. They walk past physical memorials, they see disfigured survivors with missing limbs, and consume poems and books and songs about what happened. Whether you were someone who personally survived and was injured in the genocide or whether your connection is more indirect doesn’t matter - the collective trauma is the group’s experience as a whole.

A collective trauma does not have to be something that occurred on a national or international scale, like a genocide or world war. Collective trauma can occur on a much smaller, more localized scale. The students who survived the Stoneman Douglas school shooting are part of a collective trauma, as are the community members who lived in Parkland at that time; whether they were students who actually survived taking a bullet or just concerned community members whose view of their hometown was shattered by the event, they were part of a collective trauma that developed around that event. My hometown lost four boys when their hockey team’s bus crashed into a semi-trailer two years ago - that event was a collective trauma for my hometown, and for the people outside our hometown who knew those boys and their teammates. An event does not have to be famous to form a collective trauma, and you don’t need to be right at the center of it to identify with that collective trauma - the trauma exists independently of any one person.

This pandemic certainly qualifies as a collective trauma because it has disrupted the lives of nearly everyone on earth, in a variety of different ways. The vast, vast majority of us won’t actually be traumatized by this pandemic in a clinical sense - most people will find the disruption annoying and kind of scary, but they won’t have nightmares and flashbacks for years after it ends - but they are still a part of the collective trauma. Everyone who survives this pandemic is probably going to be weird about physical contact and cleanliness and crowded spaces for a very long time to come - that’s collective trauma. It’s going to take a very long time for people to start seeing things like movie theatres and concerts and public transit as totally “safe” again, and stop worrying about the possibility that they may get some kind of infection. We might stop shaking hands entirely, and a lot of office jobs might permanently shift to a work-from-home model. Tourism in NYC may suffer for years, and it might take a really long time for the city to shake off the notion that it is a “dirty” and “infected” place. All of that is collective trauma. Even if you aren’t currently on the front lines of an emergency room or facing imminent financial ruin from losing your job, you’re still probably going to feel a little uneasy in crowded places and get upset if your coworker comes to work sick for years to come after all this is over, and that’s still part of the trauma. It’s about the way that our society changes after something catastrophic happens, and it will affect all of us, even if we had a relatively easy few months sitting at home binging Netflix.

Hope this helps!

Miss Mentelle

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