Peace, Love, and Post Traumatic Stress

It's a funny thing, this business of providing services for survivors. On the one hand, we hope we hear from lots of people who will brave their public and private concerns to announce to us and more importantly themselves, that here I am, I exist, and I need help. On the other hand, I'd like to work myself out of a job. I hope to hear from survivors and at the same time wish there was no violence and subsequently no survivors to help.

Like your quintessential beauty queen, I too want world peace. I want to eradicate the malefactors and ease the suffering of their victims. And this intolerance towards violence mixed with an almost violent hatred of any sort of perpetrator of trauma is quite an expected result of post traumatic stress from human brutality.

So how do I get what I want without crossing the line of proper society and entering a dismal life of criminality? I ask for help from my friends, neighbors, anybody who will listen and not just help for myself but for all survivors. The help we require is for our community to take an active role in accepting that violence is in fact pervasive, a situation unlikely to change anytime soon, and there are too many victims to deny us this truth, the truth that we live each day knowing the darkness of mankind. We need a support network of community to respect us, to not question that we have survived violence, to recognize we are simply representatives of the multitude who have been affected by the vast reach of cultural and domestic war. If you can do this, then survivors are no longer overshadowed by the power of the criminal who asks nothing of you but your silent dismissal.

We need support from others because we alone cannot regain a sense of ourselves, to reconcile what we previously conceived of as normal with the revelation of the violent capabilities in everyone that we are far too conscious of now. Maybe when enough people join us in our new understanding of the world, violence will not be as seemingly tolerable, and there will indeed be fewer victims rather than too many isolated unknown survivors afraid to come forward.