Thoughts on Epstein flotsam
Michelle is a Gandhi Institute supporter and volunteer.
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Content warning: This blog piece contains references to sexual abuse of children
In early February, I started seeing a stark uptick in social media posts in which people (especially women) were discussing their struggles to process the information they were encountering from the Epstein files. I was not actively seeking to look at the file contents but it was almost impossible to be on the internet and not run into excerpted bits, on every platform. It was around this time that my appetite for engagement in anything, even fun stuff, was dramatically curtailed: I stopped volunteering; I stopped writing and playing music and making art; on some days I didn’t even cook dinner for my family.
I hadn’t really connected the dots until someone posted a link to a video by a therapist describing dissociation as a legitimate nervous system response to horrific inputs. In particular, for those of us who have experienced sexual abuse as children, the nervous system can struggle to distinguish the primary experience of trauma from cues or reminders of a past experience–emergency defense mode kicks in without the embodied context. In the repertoire of fight/flight/freeze/fawn, my downstairs brain chose deep freeze as the path to safety and forgot to send a memo to the upstairs brain to explain why. I was bewildered why I wasn’t showing up for my life, creating and serving others; was puzzled why I felt like throwing up or screaming but couldn’t; had no explanation for why staying cocooned in my blankets watching Marvel movies felt like the only valid way to spend my life. Once I connected the freeze response to a specific crumb of Epstein file content that too closely resonated with my own early life experiences, I was able to write my way out of the hole.
I have been grappling with what restorative justice looks like when the trauma is so deep that “repair” feels like a naive, wrongheaded word. There are two components that feel important to share with you all, dear Gandhi Institute friends. In Part 1, I will share how I shifted from a more traditional individualist (reductionist) perspective on “repair” to an ecosystem-inspired (systems-based) framework of “revitalization”. Part 2 will grapple with what revitalization can look like when the source of harm does not actively engage in relationship repair, exploring how to navigate situations where attempting to engage with someone who inflicted harm feels likely to further inflame injury and re-traumatize rather than leading to accountability and relationship repair.
From Reductive Individualistic “Repair” to Ecosystem-based “Revitalization”
The word “repair” carries the connotation that something can be restored to the state it was in before the injury–a simple story arc with “They lived Happily Ever After” as a fairytale ending1. Anyone who has broken a bone or had surgery knows that many injuries to the body do not fully recover to their pre-injury state; scar tissue, chronic pain, and limitations in range of motion are common lingering reminders of the injury. Injuries to the psyche also leave their mark; the associative reminders (emotional scars and triggers) can be similarly durable and it can be challenging to regain social-emotional “range of motion”.
However, “Broken Ever After” is not necessarily the trajectory of an injury story, and it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. The idea of repair is focused on a “direct corrective”2 to an injured part, but body parts are embedded in a complex whole organism, and humans are embedded in social ecosystems. In this bigger, systems-grounded context, function after an injury can sometimes wind up being better than it was before injury. For example, working with a physical therapist can teach you to use your body more safely and efficiently. I know some people for whom an illness or an injury invited them toward engagement with self-care that they had previously neglected, and they ultimately felt healthier than they did before the initial insult.
I have started using the word “revitalization” as a more ecosystem-based way to imagine how a system evolves after a traumatic event. Environmental scientists have studied how ecosystems evolve after a dramatic injury, such as deforestation or a volcanic eruption. The old-growth trees that took hundreds of years to develop are no longer there, and there are changes in the biodiversity of plants and creatures, but LIFE is stubbornly tenacious. With the ingredient of time, new ecosystems emerge with a vitality that is different but nonetheless alive and teeming with potential.
What might ecosystem-based revitalization look like?
I know what happened to me will always be part of my nervous system. For me, punishing the perpetrator will not “repair” my brain as if these experiences never happened. What would make a big difference to my nervous system is visible evidence that the ecosystem is evolving to make these predatory behaviors more likely to go extinct. The current cultural standard for justice is to hope that individuals will be charged and tried and convicted and imprisoned. How much more impactful would it be if collective engagement with the facts led to a widespread cultural shift?
I wish I saw more people (especially men) actively discussing how to purge toxic masculinity and male entitlement from our culture. I wish I saw more people (especially men) upping their caretaking energy toward all women and transgendered individuals in this time of toxic assaults on so many fronts. I wish I saw more people (especially white wealthy cisgendered heterosexual men) spending their privilege to dismantle the systems that continue to entrench that privilege. I wish everyone (especially men) who might react to these wishes with a “not all men” reflex (protective of the individual) could pause and reframe it into something collective and courageous, because all men (all people) can be part of the solution.
Tending to ecosystems takes courage and creativity and curiosity and commitment–so many C words that all require energy from the frontal lobes. As Nora Bateson says in her poem Lawnmower World, “Attending to vitality requires morale.” Morale is ecosystem-sourced energy, made of what we rehearse and whom we commune with. When we rehearse certain ideas and behavior patterns, the energy cost of these patterns is lowered through practice. The ideas and embodied practices that the Gandhi Institute amplifies in our beloved community are a source of morale for me, empowering me to bring my creative energy back into the service of our collective ecosystem–despite the indifferent lawnmowers.
Stay tuned for Part 2, in which Gandhi Institute Executive Director Erin Thompson and I explore potential routes for ecosystem evolution, reimagining individual accountability within the networks of relationships that shape our behaviors. In particular, we will dialog about options for managing (containing) harmful, exploitative behaviors and nonviolently reshaping the future.
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1 Medical Sociologist Arthur Frank refers to this as the “Restitution Narrative”.
2 A phrase I learned from Nora Bateson, referring to a simple response directly calibrated toward a circumscribed stimulus; because of interconnections in a complex system, the “direct corrective” can often yield counterintuitive (and sometimes counterproductive) effects.
