Learning anger, boundaries, and safety

How personal trauma may be shaping national politics

Fernando Mamberti, Pexels

For a few weeks, I have been thinking about how personal trauma - especially if it is not addressed - affects national politics. It finally occurred to me that I was having difficulty writing about this topic because I realize that underneath the anger that emerged with Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential victory is a great deal of grief and sadness that isn’t often expressed.

There is research that explains that children who are treated harshly in childhood are more likely as adults to vote for authoritarian leaders, even when they mimic the ‘strong man’ who treated them badly as children. Famed trauma researcher Judith Herman’s latest book explores the link between private and public experience.

“If trauma is truly a social problem,” she writes in Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023), “and indeed it is, then recovery cannot be simply a private, individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perpetrators of violence and exploitation; the actions or inactions of bystanders - all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or blame the victims - often cause even deeper wounds.”

“If trauma originates in a fundamental injustice, then full healing must require repair through some measure of justice from the larger community,” she says, based on her years of research with survivors.

Many years ago now, in trying to learn about how fundamentalistic beliefs in my childhood had affected how I thought and acted as an adult, I took a course at a personal development institute. The course, developed by a social worker whose early life had been quite feral, was called Anger, Boundaries and Safety. I found it extremely enlightening.

So many people raised in dysfunctional homes are afraid of anger, I learned, not realizing that it is a signal that their personal boundaries have been violated. Learning safety means learning that one does have boundaries, that one is entitled to have them, and that anger is not something of which to be afraid.

Part of the course involved teaching participants how to safely express anger. One way is through something called a Vesuvius. You form a circle, whose boundaries are physically set with rope or cushions. Members of the small group sit outside the circle. One participant stands inside the circle, with permission to vent their anger for several minutes - a time agreed on in advance. There are some safety rules about how to do this.

What I noticed, however, was that often participants standing in the circle would start to express their anger, only to dissolve into tears. 

I concluded that their grief was the layer underneath their anger, and that this may have been the first time they were in a safe enough environment to express it. Because all the people sitting outside the circle had chosen to be there, and to listen to them without interrupting.

Many fundamental sects never allow this kind of honest expression of emotion. They use emotion to channel and constrain peoples’ behaviour. So people who grow up in such constrained settings often have no idea that they are angry;  that they have personal boundaries; and that there are safe ways for them to express their anger that are not destructive for all those around them.

Neurolinguistics expert George Lakoff calls it the “strict father’ belief system, in which the father figure is always right, always to be believed, and always to be obeyed, and in which children must be disciplined in order to learn ‘proper behaviour’. In such systems, women are regarded as having lesser status and liable to tempt the man into ‘improper’ behaviour.

I have watched with dismay as the strict father belief system and religious fundamentalism have merged into a political belief system, in a number of places in the world. It has often silenced women, who find themselves unable to talk about abuse and family violence, while abusers are ‘forgiven’ and welcomed back to congregations. It means that young women and men don’t realize that there is a cycle of violence and that if it is not broken, they will end up repeating it.

In the US, many women, after 2016, found themselves unable to deal with the triumphalism they saw in relatives and friends who regarded Trump’s election as giving them permission to vent their beliefs in public. I know this because I was part of a huge, private Facebook group that was a safe place to share their stories and the shock they felt at learning what their relatives and friends appeared to really think but apparently had not previously expressed.

There has been a lot of discussion about why this happened and what to do about it. Some observers thought it was because rural people in the US were not understood or respected or even listened to. Some religious leaders thought it was because women had become too powerful. Some thought that it was because society had become too liberal. Others thought that it was because social media had spread conspiratorial belief systems, and that this was a response to fears about how society seemed to be changing in ways they did not understand.

But I didn’t often see grief as being one of the responses. Only recently, it seems to me, have some thoughtful commentators been talking about their sense of having lost friends and relatives - that they have been ‘stolen’ from them.

I was so struck by what Anand Giridharadas said about this kind of loss, not so long ago in his substack, The Ink:

‘Dads who lovingly braided their daughters’ hair and practiced spelling bee words with them now malign their freedoms and the people they love and the families they have made. They were stolen. People want their families back. And this is going to become a theme of this campaign.

We are neighbors. We are family. We are each other’s people. Damn the thieves. We must depose them and find each other again. And now we glimpse how.’

Then I read Caroline Giuliani’s article about how she had lost her dad to Trump. She wrote an article in Vanity Fair and talked on MSNBC. It had a political message, yes, but it was mostly the kind of grieving lament with which people in villages used to follow coffins to the cemetery.

“As someone who overcame a deeply ingrained eating disorder and has worked through various other manifestations of anxiety and depression, I’m no stranger to processing complicated feelings. But this new albatross left me floored by a potent mix of fear, anger, confusion, and sadness that often had me crying over my dad, and for him, at the same time…..”

“After months of feeling the type of sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, it dawned on me that I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too.”

Her words reminded me of watching the people in the Vesuvius circle, who wanted to express anger but instead, found themselves dissolving in tears.

This deep sense of personal loss, of personal connection, is not ideological or political, it seems to me. And it is not unique to North America.

Long ago now, in one eastern European country, our interpreter told me a story that shocked me. It was fall, and getting icy, and her mother had slipped and fallen on the pavement downtown, and couldn’t get up. Passersby walked past her as if she wasn’t there. 

Her daughter, our interpreter, was shocked to her core. Why had no one helped?

I filed this away in my mind as I spent time in other eastern European countries that had once been ruled by Communism. And I came to believe that ideological belief had created a distinction between the public and private spheres.

In private life, people had quite a lot of freedom; your home could be a safe retreat. But the public sphere required obedience to the authorities, whether that was celebrating the leader's birthday or being required to take part in a staged protest. In some countries, adherence to such beliefs was a requirement for a place to live and food to eat.

So some part of the early protests against authoritarian leadership involved starting to take back some state control over public places. In Serbia, Otpor would invite people to come and walk on a street, together. It was just a collective walk, but it slowly expanded the safety of the private space into the public space. Protesters deliberately chose not to confront people who represented authority, like police officers, so they didn’t make them into enemies. Funerals also offer a similar opportunity for protest against state authorities that is difficult for them to control completely.

These techniques, developed in the civil rights trainings of the 1960s in the southern US and taught to Otpor and other groups by Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, came to be known as ‘colour revolutions’. Now they terrify authoritarian states.

I have wondered if, in some ways, MAGA boat and truck flotillas represent the mirror image - attempts to expand their private beliefs into the public space. In Canada, convoy protesters who took over Ottawa’s downtown core in 2022 seemed quite belligerent and self-satisfied. It was not enough to take over the public space; they wanted to rub it in that they had done so, and could do it again.

The saddest thing, I think, is that when our response to this kind of anger is more anger, grief is buried deeper. Maybe the drug industry’s campaign to persuade physicians to prescribe opioids to relieve pain was actually just one more manifestation. And many politicians have become adept at offering themselves as channels for peoples’ pain, proferring glib slogans.

Because the real solution - the difficult personal work that addresses the deep traumas - is slow and often challenging. It requires finding, and healing, the individual pain that often shows up in the public space as anger. And only then, as Judith Herman tells us from her decades of research, can we have healthy public policies that allow all of us to thrive.