there's this dynamic in leftist spaces where trauma inflicted on us from outside our spaces ends up defining conflict within our spaces, and I really think it is the most important thing we need to internally address to keep up momentum.

like, you cannot be marginalized in the US and not have trauma. The US is traumatizing. By extension, lefty spaces are largely, if not mostly, defined by people who have trauma. unpacking said trauma therefor at least can't HURT.

here's the thing about trauma-thinking: it encourages "all-or-nothing", it encourages you to be on guard and on the defensive, it trains you to look for enemies, and it wants you to stay in fight/flight/freeze mode. This is all stuff we know. It's kept most of us alive at times.

But its not perfect or always right, its an animal-brained survival mechanism, and we're a LOT better at recognizing when we need sympathy and patience for it than we are at recognizing when another traumatized person needs sympathy and patience.

Traumatized people don't want to be traumatized again. Shocker. So trauma trains you not to show vulnerability. But it also makes us more vulnerable because of how many abusive people get quite good at exploiting others' trauma. Shit like love-bombing works for a reason.

Abusers isolating people with "I'm the only one you can trust, aren't I the nicest to you?" works for this reason, and because it works it then ends up feeding that trauma-thinking further and people start seeing genuine niceness as a possible warning sign.

So the problem is we're all traumatized and it makes it hard to trust each other or assume good faith or allow for conflict that isn't all or nothing, but also if we do extend trust or sympathy its still uphill because everyone else has the same trauma making it hard to trust us

But also? It's not "never distrust anyone" or "never express frustration" or "never protect yourself" because that'll get you killed. Making your trauma not the unexamined, default driver of your actions doesn't mean never listening to it.

I don't know the answer beyond just everyone working really hard to do it until we've made spaces where its easier to do it intuitively. Sorry. Its hard and we're bad at it and its usually thankless and we have to trust each other in order to trust each other but we gotta do it.