Healing for empath trauma victims and an exposure of narcissism

When I hear stories of first nation elders saying to their young’uns who want to yarn about how it was and what they lived through, “Best leave it and move on,” I hear a burden too great to bear — for not only the elder but for those who need hope coming through.

Too often our aboriginal brothers and sisters have been faced with a hell of a choice — go back and attempt to heal the past and risk getting stuck there OR move forward from the present into what can only look like survival into the future.  (A few may transcend enormous odds, yet these are often cut down like tall poppies.)

To go back is to heal,
but there are risks re-entering trauma,
and to do the other is to engage in 
spiritual bypassing that heals nothing.

Spiritual bypassing is especially damaging in that first nations culture is an oral tradition.  Yarning is inherent to it.  When people can’t yarn, healing becomes impossible.

Healing trauma is not just a first nations issue, but we can learn so much from the Aboriginal Australian experience.

There are literally millions of souls over the world who face the quandary: go back and heal but face getting stuck there or move forward by way of a functional denial in the hope that leaving the past behind won’t hurt the present and future.

For the Aboriginal Australian, they’ve had to let go of their languages, which only survived by a miracle of God’s grace when they did.  Move forward, don’t look behind, in fear of becoming what Lot’s wife became, you survive, but you also leave everything behind.

The cost of survival is loss, and loss equals trauma, and yet true survival is a thriving, or a recovery, or acceptance, of what was lost.  That can be nigh-on impossible for survivors of trauma.

So many have been locked out of the Promised Land and they reside in a waystation of sorts where hope blurred into the abyss a long time back.  A hope deferred makes a heart sick.  This is a dimension that so many completely misrepresent, blaming the victim, minimising the harm done to them, disbelieving the narrative of truth they carry.

Most victims of abuse face not only the initial abuse, but a compounding of abuse.  The one who would abuse them is also of a mind to justify the abuse.  They cover it over, and if it isn’t to cover their tracks — which it so often is — it’s to pave a path for a propagation of those same behaviours of abuse.  People abuse because they have a pattern of abusive behaviour.

The purpose of this article is to set forth the conundrum of the abuse survivor, the traumatised one, for they have no recourse to either go back or go forward.

Most people will not and do not understand.

Unless a person has borne trauma in their body — and the appropriate word is ‘in’ — they have no idea what toxic effect that trauma has on a person, especially as the person is re-triggered; an effect that is physiological just as much as it is psychological.

Trauma is locked and loaded in the survivor of abuse.  Just as there is a ‘set and forget’ phase in early childhood development, where attachment is either healthy or usually maladapted, there is a ‘set and forget’ effect in a person who has been exposed to trauma-bonding abuse.  What are they to do now — go back with great risk or go forward and miss out?

If the person reading this has no empathy for first nations people and the trauma that’s been inflicted on them by a marauding race favoured so obviously by the power of force, then they’re either on the side of tyranny, or by their silence they cavort with the side of tyranny.  Same result.  And yet, this dynamic is played out in a great many more lives than the indigenous who are the tip of the iceberg.

We live in a world that is increasingly affected by trauma.  We need to respond by preventing it in the first place, and by making space for structures of safety that support healing.

We also live in a world where the tyrannised are gaining their voice.  And watch out for the justice they’ll wreak.  It inspires hope in the faithful that God will indeed have divine justice this side of the eternal divide.

For those who have borne the irreversible effects of trauma outbound of abuse, who are those who would never do those harms to another, this is the diabolical situation they find themselves in.

There are those who do harm and there are those who would never, but then there are those who have been harmed who do the harm, because that’s the effect of trauma on some.

Narcissism, we know, is a personhood without substance, so much so that the narcissist must suck the life out of the empath they draw into their net.  The one who is a shell seeks the one made of substance.  It is a relational transaction — one has need of wholeness and the other has need to help and heal.  The only problem is the narcissist has no desire of the variety of help and healing that the empath offers, yet they string the empath along.

The empath offers the narcissist safe harbour and healing from trauma (either consciously or unconsciously), but the narcissist can never be vulnerable enough to admit it’s there.  What the empath gets instead is their own taste of the narcissist’s trauma.  The narcissist always seeks to win, and their ‘win’ is to ‘infect’ the empath with trauma.

For our first nations people over the world, they have been the empaths; and the marauders, the narcissists.  Even those who did their service for the indigenous by good intent, but through ignorant arrogance.  The end result is the same.

Societally and personally, we must repent.  We must bring a justice forth.

If we’re part of the problem, we must begin to see it and make steps to make restitution.

If we’ve been on the receiving end, we can balance a commitment to heal the past with holding a hope for a future we can reconcile.

Finally, wherever possible, in our personal lives, we must endeavour not to enable narcissists.  The clue is in the enabling; those who insist we enable them, well, we know who THEY are.

Photo by Pandav Tank on Unsplash