12 - Slavery, Trauma, and Healing for the Soul

You don’t know that you have a soul until someone tries to steal it. I think this is revealed not lonely in individual or personal experiences of trauma, but also the traumatic experience of groups of people. 

Stoic philosophy – which reflects so well the techniques recommended by therapists for people with PTSD – emerged from traumatic events in ancient Greece and in particular the enslavement of Athenians after their failed invasion of Syracuse. Stoicism became resurgent later in the traumatic events shaking the Roman empire. These included plague, internal corruption and social injustice, moral collapse, economic inequities, wars and rumors of wars, and more. 

Judaism – which has influenced so much of western philosophy and modern psycho-therapy – emerged from traumatic experiences of slavery resulting in the exodus from Egypt, exile in Babylon, diaspora from the destruction of the Temple in Roman times, persecution throughout the Christian world, holocaust in World War 2. 

The extreme predicament of people(s) with PTSD is that they are town between a thirst for revenge and a feeling of utter powerlessness. So powerless does the victim feel, and so shamed by their powerlessness, that often they cannot speak. Words of anguish, calls for help, all seem to die in their throats. In response to abuse all they can do is whisper. Often the response of a traumatized group is to sing. They may not be able to explain their anguish, but they can sing about it, write poetry about, and draw pictures of it. 

By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion … O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” Psalm 137: 1, 8-9 

In a sense, the recovery of Jerusalem was akin to a people recovering their collective soul. I have always been struck by the words of Nehemiah (8:10) upon the re-building of Jerusalem by the exiles: The joy of the Lord is your strength! It reflects a different choice on the part of PTSD people. Revenge leads, as it always does, to self-destruction and to the perpetuation of the victimizer/victim cycle in which the abused become future abusers. The alternative is the rediscovery of the soul. The direct opposite of sorrow is not vengeance but joy. Is it possible for PTSD people to ever fully experience joy again? Yes. But the healing of the soul is only possible by reunion with God. 

The most poignant experience of slavery for the Americas is the enslavement of Africans and their forcible relocation to the Americas. The legacy of their sorrow tends to be expressed more in image and art. Examples of slave art often reflect both profound sorrow and suppressed rage. The hope of recovery, however, is most often expressed in song. Multiple genres of music have emerged from their past (and present) experiences of trauma. Music often reveals the tension between despair and hope. There are two ways to respond: seek vengeance or rediscover soul. I think this is why African-Americans, and also aboriginal peoples indigenous to the Americas, often have a deeper and richer spirituality than many Euro-Americans. 

“Spirituality” is at the root of all religion and of Christian faith doctrinally defined. It is, in a sense, the instinct of the soul. It is the intuition that the human soul is incomplete. The individual soul may merge with another human being (“soul-mates”), and this lies at the root of marriage. This is why gender is too limited a concept to apply to marriage, because the human soul only informs gender but is not defined by gender. Yet even “soul-mates” intuit that their union is incomplete. “Spirituality” is the intuition that true wholeness only comes when the human soul reunites with the universal soul. 

And what lies at the root of “spirituality”? where does this intuition come from? I suggest the roots of spirituality lie in suffering because suffering is existence itself. I do not mean that we are always in pain. I mean that that suffering is the human reaction to its situation, namely, transient, imperfect, flawed, decaying, aging, and dying. Suffering is fundamentally the experience of both feeling and actually being lost. 

If suffering is what makes existence what it is, then the experience of slavery is perhaps the epitome – better, the “embodiment” of what suffering means. It is the ultimate state of being lost. The slave is torn from home, family, friends … all the joys and challenges that come from personal freedom … and is ultimately renamed so as to become objects rather than subjects. There are degrees of happiness possible in existence, but slavery is the ultimate hopelessness. 

In a sense, the experience of slavery (either as victim or victimizer) is what makes or breaks the soul. And this is true for the individual soul and also the soul of a nation. Afro-American spirituality is a quest to restore wholeness to the soul. It may or may not evolve into religion, and if it does that religion may or may not be Christian or Muslim, sectarian or cultic. What blocks the enslaved soul in its quest for meaning and purpose is the temptation to utterly lose self-esteem and despair. But anything that generates meaning and promises hope … even something as small as a protest march … can become a spur toward spirituality. 

The challenge for Euro-Christians is the reverse. They start with religion and must somehow work backwards to recover authentic spirituality. That is a more difficult task. This is not just because religion is so structured and rational. It is because religion (and American religion in particular) is based on a mythology of success. Since suffering is reduced, moderated, or controlled, by a relatively higher economic or social status, the illusion of well-being blocks Euro-Americans from awareness that they even have a soul. Capitalism, socialism, and any other political “ism”, taken to extreme, always creates this illusion and diminishes the awareness of the soul. 

In other words, “religion” has become a form of slavery that is all the more deceptive and destructive to the human soul because it guarantees success. Religion is a rational wall erected by humans afraid of suffering. In the effort to keep suffering at bay, they also distance themselves from the deep spirituality that is (was, or should be) the root of religion. This is why some Afro-Americans (particularly in the 60’s civil rights movement) renounced Christian religion. It was yet another form of enslavement. And this is why many millennials today reject religion altogether. 

Can the soul be healed? Can the human being truly escape slavery? Yes and no. 

No in the sense that striving, suffering, and death lies at the very core of existence, and at its worst will always feel like slavery. The fight against slavery will not be accomplished in our time or anyone’s time. We will always struggle with suffering. Every human being will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, to lesser and greater degrees, until they die. 

Yes in the sense that cultural constructs of slavery can be dismantled and overcome. We may not be able to change the nature of existence, but we can change the culture in which we live. We can change the policies and programs, laws and institutions which can be used as instruments of slaver. We defeat slavery by moral intentionality and intervention. 

We can also win a deeper, more personal struggle with prejudice that is hidden in our attitudes, and revealed in our unrehearsed words and spontaneous deeds. This is an everyday struggle to change our individual lifestyles. Cultural habits are embedded into our unconscious, unthinking, assumptions and reactions. A culture of radical individualism predisposes us to habits of competition and domination. Slavery, like racism, is a kind of addiction – a self-destructive behavior pattern that we chronically deny. The struggle to overcome it resembles the recovery from addiction: self-awareness, self-discipline, peer community support, mentoring relationships, and so on. 

It takes more courage to change yourself than to change society. Yet it is only when we change ourselves that we can bring lasting change to policies, programs, laws, and institutions.