Who is Telling This Story?

What does trauma have to do with either colonisation or mental illness? And what does self-determination have to do with healing from trauma, as a people, or as an individual? It is time to take self-determination seriously as a source of healing.

We know this at a collective level from our experience of de-colonisation over the past few decades. Self-determination is so important to recovery of our mana from the impacts of colonisation. The need to be able to tell our own stories about our tupuna and their courage in the face of unimaginable cruelty. Their courage to continue to exist, to protest, and their courage to hold onto hope for better futures. The courage that we still carry.

At times I have found strength in stories of my great grandmother. Stories that tell me that she didn’t just let colonisation happen to her. She didn’t give up her language, her culture, her right to be Maori and to associate with Maori, nor her right to pass those aspects of her being on to her tamariki.

Those rights were taken from her with violence. Despite the violence, she did resist and protest in the only way that she could in that context. She used to run away. The stories of her tell me of her courage and tell me that her connections to tikanga and to being Maori were so strong that she kept running back to those whenever she could. And that gives me strength to hold those connections myself to honour her. You will have your own stories that illustrate courage and identity and honour. And you will know the ones that give you strength.

Self-determination over our own stories is essential because our stories are the ones that we own and can carry with strength. They connect us to wairua and whakapapa. Other people’s stories about us re-enforce colonisation even when those stories are nice, and positive, it is disempowering when they dominate our own stories.

So why am I also talking about healing from trauma? I want to state that self-determination has the same level of importance in healing from the impacts of trauma on individuals.

From 15 years working as a counsellor, working mostly with Maori and mostly with people with histories of severe trauma, I fundamentally believe that self-determination is essential for healing from traumatic histories for the individual. For very similar reasons to why it is essential for healing as a people from traumatic histories of colonisation.

When I was starting out in counselling, I was lucky to get into a training program that was based on postmodern, collaborative, and narrative paradigms. These ideas and practices were in opposition to the dominant mainstream professional ones. I am not advocating here for those paradigms, however they did implore me not to follow models. It allowed me to relate to people in real ways that made sense, without having professional theories or models in the room with us. And allowed me to develop my own stories about trauma and healing.

I do not in any way want to take away from the work of our tohunga and healers. There are so many ways and settings in which healing occurs and is advanced. Wairua is always a part of it. I believe that the work that I did with people was unblocking things that prevented them from taking up healing. It was one small part, but often a beginning. The unblocking would then see them setting off on a pathway to healing that would often include mirimiri, Rongoa, whanau, te reo, marae and all connections with te ao maori.

But let me be clear, when I am in a room with someone helping them, I do not give them my stories about trauma and healing as a way of describing what is happening for them nor do I give them a predetermined process for healing. That is where the self-determination comes in. If you are doing the work together and they are finding the words and they are doing the interpreting of what you find, rather than you, then you will arrive at stories that are theirs. Stories that have come out of the talking together rather than coming solely from you and have come from their own memories and connections.

Imagine that instead of sitting with a professional who has been primed to look for what is wrong with you, so that you can challenge that, you get to sit with someone who is helping you to search amongst your memories for moments of mana and moments of hope and the connections that enabled those moments to exist in amongst trauma. Even for the most severely traumatised, those moments are there somewhere in their history. Something has kept them alive in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

From the moments of mana and hope, re-discovered within someone’s memories, you can together build stories that are supportive of them and that are theirs. Stories about their relationship to mana, and their relationship to all of the good stuff of life that the trauma taught them they didn’t deserve. And stories about their connections. Instead of trying to uncover their true self or their true identity, trying to uncover stories about their relationship to mana and to life.

If you give someone a story pre-written, even where you think it may reflect that person, it does not have the same power. And that person will see you as the source of good stories about them. And will come back for more. It is the old saying of give a person a fish versus teach a person to fish.

Why do we need to get out from under the dominance of western professional ways of thinking and working?

We have to realise the historical context of the different professions involved in mental health, psychiatry, psychology, counselling, social work, nursing, support workers. The professions have competed over territory of expertise and territory of funding. That competing has evolved into the hierarchy of professions that exists today. Those hierarchies are imposed on us when we send our people off to train in those professions, for them to come home and fit into the hierarchy. And imposed on us when Whanau Ora workers were slotted into the hierarchy next to support workers.

Psychiatry and psychology have won the right to sit at the top of the hierarchy, and from there, to define or tell the stories about what we are suffering from and what the treatment should be. And the right to write reports about us for the justice or other systems. It is offensive to me that a dominating relationship is offered to a dominated people as a vehicle for healing.

To give up that power to define would mean giving up their position in the hierarchy, and potentially losing funded territory in the system. I suggest that we can’t overcome the obstacle of unwillingness to share power. But we can step outside that disempowering and divisive system to bring together our own ways.

I am challenging professional hierarchies and ideas here. Not the important work that our people are doing. There have been challenges to the dominant professional paradigms from our Maori professionals within the system. Their work has been important in expanding the focus of the professions. But the power of the psychiatry and psychology professions has not shifted. Any good work from within those professions happens despite the system rather than as a result of it.

But we don’t actually need that expertise. We can build our own paradigms and practices that our people can use to support our own. And develop our own ways to allocate people to helping roles, to build our expertise, and our own ways to keep everyone safe. To become our own profession rather than be an add on to someone else’s professions. The sort of work that will be more effective when done, in a place where self-determination can flourish, namely, outside of the dominating system.

I write this in the hope that many of our people who are disempowered in the current professional hierarchies can be empowered to be therapeutic practitioners in their own ways. For example, whanau ora workers could do much more, if given the support and license. We don’t have to send them off to do a clinical psychology degree for them to be the most awesome therapists.

To collectively develop self-determined stories and ideas and practices from our own world view that will support our people to do the work of opening us up to healing. Stories derived from our collective worldview, based around relationship rather than individual identity. Derived from what we can re-imagine of how our tupuna might address the sort of trauma occurring within whanau that they never had to deal with before colonisation. We do need to develop our own stories. And to make those stories more intricate and practical and applicable and comprehensive. Stories that take us places together.