I've argued in the first chapter of this series that communal living is immensely challenging for Westerners because we're socialised in to Individualism, the characterstically Western formulation of selfhood which gives us immense personal freedoms at the price of isolation. Because it is how our sense of self is constructed, Individualism is deeply embedded in each Westerner, which means that no matter our political commitments or what structural arrangements we set up in communal situations to help us be different, it is profoundly confronting to try to move beyond the patterns we carry within us which generate both our freedoms and our separation from others. As a result, most communities recreate fundamental patterns of individualism such as nuclear family or separated couples, rather impersonal shared housing, or become isolated from other communities.
While we wish to retain the strengths and freedoms of Individualism, living communally requires that we learn an entirely new way of being which at present doesn't exist: learning new skillsets that enable us to become Individuals-in-relation. But moving beyond Individualism isn't only about learning new skills. Individualism is a way of being a self - it is extremely deeply sedimented into our being beyond our conscious control such that we continuously and automatically behave as a Western individual nearly all the time. To move out beyond the limits of Individualism, then, we have to encounter and somehow address the internal structures of Individualism which are lodged within us.
How do we become Individuals?
How does Individualism "get in" to us so deeply, and why is it so incredibly hard to change? And, more importantly, how might we move beyond its confines?
Research since the 1990s in the field of neurophysiology has massively expanded our understanding of nervous systems and especially the effects of trauma. This new knowledge has formed the basis for powerful new therapeutic modalities working with developmental trauma - that is, trauma from childhood. Combining this new knowledge with social and political analyses allows the formation of a biopsychosocial understanding of Individualism as a distinct pattern of common developmental traumas shared across wide swathes of the Western population, producing common patterns of trauma-response which are so widespread as to be taken as normal social behaviour in the West.
To move towards being Individuals-in-relation, then, we must move beyond the non-conscious hold which trauma has upon us to open up space where new ways of relating become practically doable at a day-to-day level.
However inner work on personal trauma is not sufficient for moving beyond the atomising patterns of Individualism. if our aim is to become Individuals in relation then we must do so actually in relation. This means we must also address our relationships and the culture - the norms, beliefs and values -in which our relationships go on. Despite Individualist culture portraying us as atomised units which are “free,” in practice we are always constrained to some extent by what our existing relational landscape enables us to do and how it reflects our self back to us. Especially in the area of relationships and relating, our existing landscape is profoundly shaping: I might do a whole bunch of personal work, and at workshops and events develop a range of new relational skills. But unless I can use those skills in my close relationships in daily life then at a profound level the structure of my selfhood does not fundamentally change; I remain at atomised Individual, albeit with a higher level of relational skill.
Thus, alongside work on developmental trauma it is equally important that our personal relationships are also changing. This can be in the form of both new people and expanding the terrain in existing relationships. Bringing profound change to existing relationships is of course a lot more challenging, even when all parties are willing, but they also become immensely strong with a huge depth of trust when major change is traversed together.
Western culture has developed a wide range of tools and techniques which can enable us to do all these things. What I call "relational technologies" or reltech have been developed in the fields of personal growth, neuroscience, public health, psychotherapy, group psychology, addiction/recovery, communication studies and others, and these can be deployed skilfully to soften the hold Individualism has on us and open new spaces for experimentation and learning.
My personal experience is that the combination of this new trauma-informed perspective on Individualism with a range of therapies alongside practical relational exploration provides excellent answers to those key questions: how does Individualism get in to us, why is it so sticky once it's there and, most helpfully, what can we do about it.
In the rest of this chapter I’ll give a sketch of how trauma sediments Individualist patterns inside us. I’ll go on to discuss the conventional relationships around us reinforce Individualism at a relational level, and how cultural stories and norms embedded in social structures reinforce the naturalness of Individualism. Finally I’ll show how all these things go together to create what appears to be a seamless and complete experience that Individualism is the only possible way to be a self.
Growing nervous systems
Firstly I’ll look at trauma and our nervous system. The account I give below is a vastly simplified condensation from the new perspectives which have emerged from neurophysiological research this century.
It's a feature of human babies that we come in to the world with a partially-formed nervous system and brain, requiring a long postnatal nurturing period during which we're pretty helpless. In the young years prior to change of teeth a large number of complex emotional-behavioural patterns get firmwired into our part-formed nervous system as it continues to develop. The patterns themselves emerge as events unfold and we experience them and react to them, and the possibilities for response available to us are shaped by the guidance and mirroring from other beings around us.
Every person goes through this process, and one of the outcomes is that our nervous systems become the right shape for us to participate in the culture in which we live. We imbibe language(s), we attune to emotional tones, we develop patterns of relating and, increasingly throughout childhood, we find our own ways to be with the possibilities and constraints presented to us via our caregivers, significant others and social situations we find ourselves in.
Alongside this universal experience, every culture incorporates the neurological fact of early-years nervous system development through norms and discourses about babycare, raising children, childcare, education, initiation and so on. The many thousands of human cultures have a massive range in this area, from jaw-droppingly violent to breathtakingly gentle, and everywhere in between. In our Western culture with its billion or so people and Individualist freedoms there's an enormous variety of subcultures but there is a clear predominance of childrearing techniques which are violent. Depending on where and when you look, the violence ranges from mild to mortal, but violence is universally experienced by children. Even highly capable and well resourced parents seeking to be kind to their children cannot insulate them from the ubiquitous systemic violence which structures everyday life for parents and children alike.
Trauma as structure
The significance of violence for my account here is that in certain circumstances violence produces trauma. Trauma is what happens when the nervous system is overwhelmed by inputs it's unable to process and shuts down in protection, but then doesn't soon after have the opportunity to unwind, to open up again and return to neutral. Periodically being overwhelmed by inputs is just an inevitability of being alive. It's not a bad thing; our nervous systems evolved in the context of this reality and cope very well with it. Where culture enters is the extent to which the recovery phase is valued and space made for it, or attenuated or refused entirely.
As babies and young people, with partially developed nervous systems and limited physical capacities, our threshold of overwhelm is pretty low, though we also have very short recovery times too. Each culture offers norms and toolkits for what to do when little ones are overwhelmed: for example, attend, mirror, not notice, deny, escalate, or a mix of those and other responses.
When a partially developed nervous system doesn't have the opportunity for recovery, the trauma becomes incorporated into the structure of the nervous system, cos the trauma becomes an ingredient in our developmental process: it is one of the events we experience. We then carry the neurological residue of that trauma throughout the rest of our lives.
Trauma of this type is called developmental trauma cos it's an ingredient in our neurological development process, as distinct from episodic trauma, which can happen any time but is not so significant at the developmental level.
Trauma and Individualism
The way a culture perpetuates its violent ethos is to ensure violence becomes sedimented into its children. Our Western culture does this through the norms, practices and discourses on childrearing which guide caregivers to inhibit children's recovery from a selection of overwhelming experiences, while enabling and supporting recovery from others.
This means the vast majority of Westerners end up with particular collections of developmental trauma which fit us to participate in Individualist Western social life. Because these patterns of trauma are so widespread among Westerners, much of our Individualist weirdness appears as "normal" to us - in other words when we enact those trauma responses we fit in seamlessly to Western social life.
When we attempt communal living this collection of traumas becomes visible when we become panicky, frozen, aggressive or we flee when core freedoms are restricted or denied, or when we feel vulnerable, dependent or close with others. These reactions arise in us at the level of our bodies; because they are firmwired into our nervous system we have little conscious control over whether they arise and how they affect us emotionally and physiologically.
The neurophysiological mechanism of trauma explains why so often, despite our best efforts, communal living just doesn't seem to work, and for many people doesn't seem possible at all. And it's true - at the level of our nervous systems shaped by Individualism.
I have had this experience in two recent communal living situations. Prior to these communities I had lived in 4 previous communities and had done many years of therapy, so was very familiar with communal life and had a good understanding of my psychology and my "issues." In addition I was deeply politically committed to communality and finding ways to be continuously in relation. Finally, both those situations seemed fertile ground: I had excellent relationships with my fellow communards - indeed we remain close friends, and the relational landscape in each group was kind, committed, communicative and creative. Yet I found myself again and again repeating isolating and abusive patterns almost beyond my own volition. This finally got me to do my own traumawork.
Working with trauma
Recent neurophysiological research on developmental trauma has come up with new therapeutic techniques to soften the hold that trauma has on us and give us direct entry into those areas of our nervous systems which have been formed through trauma. As the frozen areas of our nervous system gradually soften we are able to start growing new pathways and new capabilities which now exist alongside the trauma-responses.
The two key practices for working with trauma are titration and regulation.
The technical term for the state our nervous systems enter into when we're triggered into a trauma response is "dysregulation" - we act uncontrollably, or we become numb or silent, or a mix of all of these. When we're able to soften the hold that a compulsive response has on us and return to equilibrium or calm, the technical term is "re-regulation" or returning to a state of "regulation."
Animals do this returning to equilibrium quite naturally: a deer, startled by some calamity will give a bark and run away and then stand or lie down and shake and breathe heavily for a while. Having the space for this returning to a regulated state means the calamity does not become a trauma.
In working with trauma therapeutically, the trauma must be brought present into the therapeutic space. The problem here is that a therapeutic stimulus leads to the trauma being triggered, the person's nervous system will suddenly move to the traumatised state, and there is then little scope for any neurological change. The really tricky thing, then, is to get access to the trauma in the person's nervous system without simply re-traumatising the person. This is the first piece of new knowledge which came from the recent research: up til that point trauma appeared almost impervious to therapeutic intervention cos the interventions used so far had simply reinforced the trauma pattern in the client's nervous system.
Further research brought a way out of this impasse: to go very slowly towards the trauma trigger, and back off at the point the activation starts to occur, and support the client to re-regulate. Repeated cycles of these very tiny steps evidently gave space for the nervous system to build some new pathways alongside the trauma pattern, eventually enabling the client to come into an entirely new relation with the initial traumatic event and maintain workable nervous system functioning alongside it.
This whole process is called "titration" i.e. adding tiny doses til the system transforms.
Subsequent work on developmental trauma (as distinct from episodic trauma) shows that in fact the nervous system does not transform in the sense that the trauma becomes "healed," because that trauma became firm-wired into the structure of the nervous system as it developed. But what does happen over time is that the new pathways built through the titration process can become far more familiar, thicker and more robust than the original trauma-response pathways. This means that in most circumstances we can notice the familiar flicker of trauma-reactivity but the new response pathways feel richer or more attractive, and we retain a sense of relative ease in the presence of trauma triggers.
However those original pathways remain at deeper levels of the nervous system, which means that if we are startled, or run into an unexpected situation, or are deeply affected by something, those pathways will still be the first to be activated. In the ordinary flow of communal living this can happen at any moment, no matter how adept one is with one’s trauma patterns.
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This part of the series utilises traumawork developed in one-to-one psychotherapy to explain how Individualism “gets in” to us so deeply, and the basic one-to-one therapeutic approach to softening the hold of trauma on us. Individual therapy, however, in some ways recreates the isolation pattern in Individualism: the therapeutic relationship is a single relationship that “hangs in space” - there is no inherent or structural connections to other relationships or people outside that relationship.
Before I go on to consider how groups might be able to use an understanding of trauma, the next chapter looks at the other principal sites where Individualism is recreated and reinforced: in our relationships, in cultural norms and narratives of meaning, and in social structures.
The pieces which follow after that then start to sketch how a group of people might incorporate awareness of the personal, relational, cultural and social structures of Individualism, and utilise new relational technologies or "reltech" into a collective project to explore living more collectively and thereby gradually build a sense of being Individuals-in-relation.