The Root System Under the Rubble
Remembering Belonging and Collective Resilience in Crisis Work
For this post about the importance of the perception of social support for recovery from a disaster or other overwhelming experience, I want to address a very specific part of you. I want my words to reach the part of you that remembers the feeling of being embedded in a rich web of relationships. I want to ask this part of you to come forward, and to listen. At some point each of us felt this inextricable connection to all life. And along the way, our capacities and sensitivities to support from the whole web of life were numbed or went dormant. Not just because of circumstance or specific traumas, but also because of the ongoing impacts of living within an ideology of individualism, on which capitalism and extraction thrive. So that even if our caregivers desired to connect with us in nurturing ways when we were children, we still exist in a paradigm and are shaped by a language, English, which reinforces a severing of relationality.
But our capacity for connection and for feeling this connection to the whole of the web of life exists in us still, even when our sensory apparatus has had to numb to this reality for us to survive. It unfurls in us like the first shoots of green coming out of a seed underground, growing towards sunlight that it can sense but can not yet directly access. But in the absence of obstacles, it grows towards that which nurtures. In us this feels sometimes like a longing for something unnameable. This longing can feel awful, like a giant hole inside that we try to fill with substances, with business, and for many white people whose ancestors were severed from land and driven to flee Europe for the US, with the mining of other cultures for something that feels nurturing to the psyche of spirit. These can all drive us to violence to ourselves and others, mimicking the extraction that individualistic logic commits on the earth.
The longing can also be a compass, something I learned from Staci Haines & generative somatics. If we follow this longing it can point us back to the rich relational field that is the entire web of life. That we were never separate from but which we may have forgotten how to feel. In my work, I look at the ways disasters can be portals that call us back into relationship with each other and this web of life. I’m going to talk about disaster mental health from that perspective in this post.
In the Hobfoll framework of elements that help with recovery in the early stages of a trauma, connectedness is one of the most researched. It can be said that a trauma is not in the event itself, but in the availability or lack of social support during and after the event. If trauma is anything that overwhelms our capacity to come, connectedness is one of the most important ways to metabolize an experience. But individualism strips many of us of the capacity to feel this support even when it is available. It is as if the connective apparatus of our being, the reciprocal membrane, is damaged by the dominant culture even before a trauma occurs.
I want to put forward a perspective I hold on disaster mental health. This perspective is not something I came up with; not by a long shot. But it is a perspective shift I have experienced through a number of sources. Through working with Lakota elders and activists in South Dakota following the Standing Rock direct action encampment. Studying with the folks at Relational Uprising. Reading the book Restoring the Kinship Worldview and putting the lessons into practice. And connecting with my own lineage and the land my own ancestors were severed from generations back in Sicily. I felt my own sensitivity to connection to shift, and my whole sense of how reality operates shifted with it.
This perspective is that connectedness is not a thing we do but the way reality operates. This means that relationality is an ontology, not a practice. Trauma happens when the truth of interdependence is ruptured at the somatic level. Healing is remembering this truth. We did not evolve to do this remembering alone, as isolated individuals. In this worldview, there never truly is a state of being alone. But we can absolutely feel exiled from this reality, which can destroy our minds and bodies.
During disasters, emergencies and other crises, there can be literal and psychological infrastructure collapse. This involves sudden isolation, displacement, and breakdowns/disruptions to social networks. People often experience fragmentation of meaning and purpose. From the Hobfoll perspective, connectedness is:
The perception that one is connected to others through family, community, social structures, and institutions.
The experience of social support as a buffer against stress and trauma.
A sense that you are not alone in your suffering, and that there are others who are invested in your wellbeing.
This framework emphasizes psychological stabilization after disaster. If we free this perspective from Western psychology’s focus on the individual, we can start to expand our understanding of how a disaster, while a horrible thing that we don’t want to happen to anyone, can also serve as a catalyst for returning to our relational roots. Because the disconnection that follows a traumatic event is not a symptom of individual pathology. If we start to use a liberatory and decolonial perspective, like the one I learned from Relational Uprising and other experiences, we can start to see how disconnection is the product of systems designed to isolate and dominate. Systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler-colonialism. Connectedness, in this context, is not just a trauma intervention but a radical act of remembering our inherent wholeness.
In this way, connectedness as an element of disaster mental health is not just an intervention. It is a way to embody belonging within a web of human and non-human relationships. It goes beyond relationships as protective factor or even healing mechanism to becoming a site of wholistic cultural repair. In this way we can support the collective not just in coping with the effects of a disaster, but in tapping into our inherent resilience to transform the conditions that make disasters so deleterious to the spirit and psyche.
What I witness in my own work with disaster mental health response teams, there are a few themes emerging:
A focus on restoring the social fabric as equally as important as restoring physical infrastructure
Modeling co-regulation and mutual care during the trainings and during disaster response, not just discussing it as important
Starting to prioritize relational intelligence over heroic individualism
I’ve been writing about this in a theoretical way so far but this sense of connectedness has become vivid in my life as I have started to restore my own sensitivity to the vast, distributed network of relationships that I sense in my own body. This sense that reality is relational came to me both suddenly and sometimes in whispers. The living, breathing substrate of mutuality and reciprocity that underlies our existence motivates me to share what I know about restoring connection after traumas but also building the shared capacity to transform the conditions that cause so much trauma to begin with.
In Sicily, we stayed on a citrus farm at the base of Mt. Etna. and practiced singing and drumming together in the groves. Our somatic facilitator guided us in a practice of opening up to all of the life around us. They asked us to go out and find something that caught our curiosity, and then to ask that thing how it would like to be alive together. I walked barefoot out into the sprawling citrus grove. The earth had a sort of energy arising from it that I could feel, not something I experienced much back in New York. I wandered around until a specific lemon caught my attention. I’m not sure what it was about this lemon but I felt like it had a personality that sort of matched mine. It was radiating something I could feel, that made me want to say hi. Basically, this big Sicilian lemon had a fun little personality. So I sat with this lemon and asked it how it wanted to be alive together. I received the impulse to scratch the rind with my fingernail and smell it. It was the most prominent lemon smell I have ever experienced. And it was wild to sit with a lemon and know that it was a living, growing and ripening thing just like me, and that it communicated with me through color and smell. This reciprocity stayed with me throughout the trip and even still.
When I think about traumatic experiences I’ve lived through, it is tempting to tell the story as if I had to get through it myself, without any help. It certainly felt that way at the time, which is often what was so painful about these experiences. But through this relational perspective, I can see how much support I had from the non-human world. From the trees I climbed as a child and the toads I caught in the tall grass by the bay on the Jersey Shore with my Aunt Kate. From my piano teacher who couldn’t intervene directly to help me when things were chaotic at home but who gave me free voice lessons after school when my mother wouldn’t pay for piano as a punishment. From the food I ate and all of the people responsible for that food growing and making it to my plate. Once I could see all of that support and start to feel it in my psyche and my soma, I began to see the importance of this felt sense of relationality in trauma recovery. So many of us feel so alone. That is built into the systems we live in, the very ideology driving the dominant culture. It is a radical act to turn to each other and ask, how would you like to be alive together?
Disasters are going to continue to happen. And we live within the traumatizing conditions of a climate crisis driven by capitalism and white supremacy. But if you can begin exorcising the heroic individualism from the nooks and crannies of your body, while softening into the reciprocity we were all born capable of, disasters can be sites of the cultural repair needed to metabolize and memorialize.