Survivor Literacy

We all have brains, but we don’t all have the time, money, or ability to go get a psychology degree. We all experience crises in our lives, but we don’t all have supportive networks with healing SCRRIPPTTs.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t all need, or deserve them.

Everything in America has a Pay Wall

America doesn’t operate on principals about making sure people’s needs are met. America operates on the principal that anything people need, can be restricted and monetized. Inequal access to resources means that those exposed to the most trauma have the least access to resources.

Not only does that create an expansive class of Americans who are only there to be preyed upon by those at the top, it also means that everyone who finds themselves inbetween the top and the bottom has to avoid the trickle-down traumas, while traumatizing others to keep from slipping into that bottom category.

It’s a meat grinder

Hegemony is Violence

Hegemony is all about the power to control. There are several ways to do this including physical force (military/police), thought control (faith institutions/public education), and restricted control of resources are all mechanisms that keep the powerful in power, and the powerless without.

In America, they’ve all been used, and are certainly being used more currently.

Any system that relies on a class of people to prey upon is inherently violent down to its bones.

In order to do so, they employ any number of mechanisms that we’re still working hard to understand.

Body Image

We could use anything to jump in with, but I get to pick, so we’re going to use body image.

Body image has always been a crucial part of social conformity. It’s hard to control people who don’t give a hoot. Every government has a dress code. How you perform that dress code determines quite a bit about what access you’ll be granted or denied. Poor performance means exclusion. Exclusion means suffering and potentially death in the long run, so it’s not superficial. It may play out over superficial things, but the need to be included is an evolutionary drive for survival.

There have been several movements against this. You have people who disregard it altogether (which affects their access to resources).

I can remember growing up in the 80s, my mom wanted me to be skinny like the models, but not act like them, and not be glamorous with hair, makeup, or clothes. I was supposed to fit the standard, but she didn’t want me to be a tramp (and with the type of men who pay attention to super models, it makes sense that she recognized a danger there).

I was never magazine skinny and I heard the same messages at home and at school concerning my exclusion. Eventually, I stopped caring that exclusion could get me killed, and I sought isolation from the imposition of these norms that were never going to fit me. I paid for that in access to resources.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the public seemed to become aware that negative body image was killing people (as I said, there have been several movements, but this was when I sensed a shift). That negative body image, an ideal set by modeling agencies and Hollywood for decades, turns people into consumers through a core belief they aren’t enough. They make you think you need something to be more successful, smarter, thinner, fitter, richer, funnier, happier, muchier.

This pressure is applied without any concept of there ever being an enough, because the whole point is to keep us needing more, buying more.

Body image being reinforced in ways that distance minorities from the hegemonic definition of normal creates real race barriers and behaviors that play out in real time. It affects everyone’s sense of self worth and it’s used to divide definitions of gender.

This example makes it easy to see how one small ideology in the American consciousness reifies power and control at all levels. Despite 2 decades of body positivity we still have Homeland Barbie, the Kirk Widow, and a first lady who was trafficked directly through those 80s modeling agencies I mentioned above (both Trump and Epstein have direct ties there).

Scholarship

Scholarship is a hot mess, and I really miss it. I miss the rigor, the collaboration, and the comraderie. I miss having my ideas challenged to make me better, and out here in the real world it’s more just personal attacks from people who don’t agree.

When you leave graduate school (or undergraduate study I suppose), you lose access to huge databases of knowledge. I used to have thousands of peer reviewed journals at my access from ALL of the fields, which is especially useful for an anthropologist because we study everything. Google and Bing don’t turn up the same results.

Out here you have to vet sources differently. There’s an awful lot that you just can’t access at all. Most journals have prohibitive subscription costs. If you can’t afford it, you just don’t get access.

I had originally majored in psychology, because I wanted to heal people (ended up with two B.A.s), but the more I learned the more I realized that a huge portion of psychology is simply pathologizing those who aren’t upperclass cishet white men.

As such it inflicts even more trauma.

I couldn’t ethically participate in that, but that also means that I won’t ever be certified or licensed.

What’s worse, is when you discover that the research is all controlled by the funding. I had tons of research ideas that would never be funded, or that would never pass the IRB (institutional review board), NOT because of an ethical problem, but because I was challenging hegemony too directly.

My grad school trauma is a topic for a different post.

The information of scholarship is restricted and gatekept. After fighting to find a project I could actually complete, it hit me that all of that work would be put in a master’s thesis that they would hide behind a paywall, and that none of the people who needed what I was learning the most would have access to it.

I was learning about hegemony, and structural violence, and upward mobility, and the working poor, and trauma, and health, and knew that all of that would be shelved away from the people who actually need it.

What was the point in getting a master’s degree if it just meant doing more work that wouldn’t reach who needs it? ( I was also being actively sabotaged by my committee chair, so I dropped out and took all of the information with me.)

The age of survivor literacy

Survivor literacy is necessary for anyone traumatize by this world. We all deserve to know how all of this is working and call out the mechanisms of oppression and abused levied against us.

Traumatization happens at all levels- partnership, family, friends, work, church, social spheres, politics, The State, nothing is free from trauma under capitalism. So we survive toxic families, workplaces, social groups and governments. We become more and more defensive, and our trauma responses become the abuse of others.

This is why we have so many narcissists and so many families mirroring Family Scapegoat Syndrome. With unresolved trauma, hurt people hurt people. It’s cyclical, and it has to be stopped on purpose.

The first step is learning what mechanisms are at play, calling them by name, and recognizing them in our daily lives. This education and awareness IS survivor literacy.

We finally live in a time when the internet is starting to fill the gap created by gatekeeping scholarship, IF you know what to ask. You’re not going to get there by looking up monster truck videos. There are, however, so many content creators who are very legit, bringing the science of trauma into public focus. (Go to youtube and search “signs of narcissistic abuse.” You can thank me later).

The source of our trauma does not matter. The damage is real, and you deserve to heal.

My Role

As an anthropologist, I get to synthesize information from a wide variety of sources. I have enough training and background in the social sciences to know what questions to ask about the psychology of trauma AND the forces of power at work. Because I went rogue, no institution or funding agency gets to determine what I can publish.

I have cultivated a library of free Youtube content from creators I trust who add to the scholarship of Survivor Literacy. I’ve found reliable trustworthy internet sources, that I love sharing. I have over 1800 videos so far, and I’m just getting started. There is so much good social science at our fingertips now, but only if we know what we’re looking for, and it’s time fot that to be accessible to everyone who needs it.

I will continue to synthesize information from all of these sources, in addition to my lived experience, to build this revolutionary way of knowing.

Happy Healing!