Heal the beloved country (Part 1: Our collective trauma)

​​South Africa is in trouble. Our society is traumatised and the trauma continues. Colonization, war, Apartheid and poverty, amongst other factors, have contributed to a historical cycle of perpetual trauma. Today, violent crime, rampant corruption, gender-based violence, drug abuse and unemployment are not only some of the manifestations of this ongoing trauma but are also continuing to keep the traumatic cycle in place. ​

Simultaneously, we are experiencing a collapse of the institutions that are meant to provide the physical and psychological containment needed to facilitate healing, economic growth, transformation and restoration of human dignity. Eskom, Transnet, SAA, Denel, public schools and hospitals, the South African Police Service (SAPS), municipalities and provincial governments are fraught with corruption and relentlessly failing to fulfil their mandates.
 
In his political analysis The Rise or Fall of South Africa (2020), Frans Cronjé, former CEO of the Institute of Race Relations, cites psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan to argue that one of the most critical requirements for South Africa's success, is the healing and transformation of our collective trauma. But Cronjé doesn't give a plan for how to do this.
 
We need such a plan.
 
But before we imagine a macro-scale plan to heal and transform our collective trauma, let's pause for a moment to fully appreciate the nature and underlying psychology of trauma and traumatised systems (groups, organisations, societies).

1. Trauma means to be 'wounded' or 'pierced'. Our psychic skin has been pierced, wounded, over many generations.
2. Trauma overwhelms us. Like too many volts that burn the fuses. In order to restore the normal flow of current, we need to relay it through a deliberately created external healing/transformative space.
3. Our knee-jerk response to being wounded is to withdraw, or hide. The external world is dangerous. Hide from it. Shun it. Hope to heal by ourselves. But, on the contrary, it is the slow and safe reconnection with others that help the victim overcome the effects of trauma.
4. A social trauma that is not healed and transformed repeats itself in ever-increasing levels of severity. It is as if the unhealed victim, individual or group, tries to make sense of the overwhelming and indescribable experience by acting it out over and over again. Sometimes in the role of perpetrator, sometimes in the role of victim. Cutting ourselves, hurting others, sabotaging processes. Over years and even generations.
5. Another effect of trauma is that, in order not to feel anything like the trauma again, we would rather not feel anything again. So we try to numb ourselves through alcohol or other drugs, or we become robotic. Without feeling. Checking boxes. Priding ourselves in our intellect. Ridiculing emotions. Growing thick, feelingless skin.
6. Revolution is not transformation. Revolve means to go round and round. In Animal Farm the pigs took over from the humans, so change did happen, but the underlying dynamics remained the same, and got worse. An unresolved trauma being repeated and repeated over and over again, in circles. A trans-formation, on the other hand, means to move from one form to another. So our system-in-the-mind of the world, where we fit into it, what our pain and suffering mean, what the Other is like, what I am like, has to take on a completely new form. I have to let go of old beliefs and stories and allow my inner world of meaning-making to change profoundly. This is no small feat.
7. Think about the Japanese art form Kintsugi. A pottery bowl falls and shatters. The artist puts it back together, piece by piece, using gold as glue. The result is both a healing and a transformation.
8. But healing and transformation require working with the unspeakable, and we will go to great lengths, even destroy ourselves, to avoid this.
9. In South Africa, for instance, some shout blood and revolution, some drink and beat their partners and children, some insulate themselves in large airconditioned pothole-resistant vehicles and security estate bastions, some disappear in nyaope or tik, some design and fill out BEE and transformation tick-boxes, some say apartheid wasn't so bad let's just forget and move on, some form gangs or even more organised mafia groups, some rape the state coffers and pillage our state-owned enterprises. Anything to avoid facing, and working through, our collective trauma, pain, shame, guilt, and rage.
10. Suppressing unspeakable emotions takes mental energy. Energy that is then not available for creative thought and problem-solving. Moreover, we cannot ever really successfully suppress emotions of this enormity, so they erupt violently or they slowly seep out in our actions, the policies we pass, the decisions we make or don't make, the machine we fail to maintain, the persons we hurt or ignore. Effectively re-traumatising ourselves over and over again.

 
You get the picture.
 
Now let this sink in: No matter who wins which elections, no matter how much money is invested in what - if we don't also start working with our shared trauma, we are at risk of unwittingly repeating the patterns that got us here.
 
But how do we heal and transform our collective social trauma? How do we move from what Vamik Volkan calls a 'chosen trauma' to a 'chosen glory'?
 
When working with individual trauma, profound care is taken to create a containing environment within which the traumatic experience can be held, made sense of and re-interpreted. When it comes to social trauma, on the other hand, institutions, symbols and myths must weave together the macro-container within which the trauma can be healed and transformed. In South Africa, however, the near disintegration of institutions such as the public health care system, the police service, the electricity supplier, water and sanitation providers, municipalities, the military and the public sector in general, have cast a cynical shadow on the Rainbow Nation myth of Nelson Mandela, leaving South Africans to feel abandoned or orphaned. With no 'mother' to console and contain and no 'father' to give a sense of direction and security.
 
Moreover, if the symbolic and institutional containers within which to heal and transform our collective social trauma have been shattered, how do we proceed? One option particularly popular amongst extreme populist politicians, seems to be the phantasy of cleansing and starting afresh, by which the degenerative splitting between 'good' and 'bad', 'us' and 'them' is taken to the extreme in order to justify eradicating 'them' from society. We have seen examples of this in the xenophobic attacks on foreign African nationals, as well as proclamations such as "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer" and the policy of land expropriation without compensation. If this fight-behaviour is one side of the 'start-afresh' coin, the flight-behaviour is the other side of the coin, as manifesting in the ever-increasing rate of emigration of highly skilled professionals, as well as general apathy, not voting, hiding behind smartphone screens or six-foot walls.
 
Splitting, projection and scapegoating is not the answer. Neither is suppression, numbing, avoidance or flight.  We have to work with the trauma. We have to create institutional containers, symbols and myths to make it possible for people to find meaning. We have to put our shattered psyche together again, patiently, with golden veins of new meaning.
 
We need a deliberate, robust, competent and large-scale effort to work with and transform our collective trauma into shared meaning, empathy and wisdom.