The cold stare is one of my most vivid, first memories of moving to Poland. It remains isolated in my mind now; what happened before or after, is anyone’s guess. The reason it resonated as powerfully as it did, was because of how unexpected it was as a response to my smile.
In Canada, smiling at strangers when you make eye contact passing them by on the street is the norm. I don’t think I would be amiss to say that in Canada, it would be considered weird to look at someone and have them notice your gaze, only to look away or keep staring without any sign of acknowledgement. Indeed, I’d think it is creepy. In contrast, smiling at someone on the street in Poland is what’s considered creepy.
The experience of having a smile unreturned and then learning not to smile at my compatriots, intensifies a distance between people already operative in Polish culture. The use of the formal Mr/Mrs (i.e. “Pan/Pani” – equivalent to the use of 2nd person plural in French) when addressing any non-family member or close friend, works to amplify this distance. Though this may seem insignificant or an amusing eccentricity of culture, it is rather, the tip of an iceberg of a kind of social isolation grown out of the history of the country. Digging a little deeper, perhaps most telling as well as jarring for a native English speaker, is the non-existence of a word for ‘vulnerable’ in Polish. These are cultural and linguistic examples of social distancing. And in the current political climate, such fundamental aspects of Polishness work to divide Poles further, to our great disadvantage.
As a Canadian-born-and-raised Pole now living in the country of my parents’ birth, I sought to understand why their culture was so antagonistic and autoimmune. History, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a lot to answer for cultural attitudes. But looking underneath the atrocities and the suffering, I found something much more relevant to understanding not only the unpleasantries that sometimes manifest in Polish social interaction, but also to understanding the massive political divide and the tensions, pettiness, and toxicity contained therein. My conclusions were quite shocking. I live in a country at war with itself, where wariness for the other (in the better instances) or hatred (in the worst instances) is a standard modus operandi, built, as it must be, on a fragile foundation of insecurity, rooted in intergenerational trauma. Ultimately, as ever, there is hope. It resides in recognizing what we all have in common, and in collaboration, coordination, and cooperation amongst all groups and subcultures within Poland.
Though this essay will explore various forms of trauma as a means of understanding cultural maladies in Poland (and the means to overcome them), such a discussion would be limited and by extension, ultimately ineffective without first exploring societal division from a broader perspective. That is, some understanding of how we define ourselves and the fallaciousness therein is necessary before we talk about ourselves.
One of the features of our postmodern world has been public discourse grounded in the idea of separation. We categorize, juxtapose, and dichotomize, all of which ultimately only ends up in reductive discussion. As Russell Brand astutely observed recently, “why are we quarrelling so vociferously about such a narrow bandwidth of alternatives?” Perhaps the nascent paradigm of metamodernism can offer a light in the darkness. Specifically, within each genre of discourse, it seeks to establish a metanarrative – a sort of recognition that anything approached subjectively can never come close to revealing the truth of any matter. In the same way, this essay seeks to establish a metanarrative for the current divisions in Poland. Our problems are just that: ours.
As I write this in late October 2020, city streets across the nation are awash with protestors remonstrating against the latest conservative legislation. How did we get here? Perhaps by the means of the aforementioned cold stare on the street: societal division and mistrust inherent to Polish culture. But this moment isn’t unique to Poland. Rather, we’re witnessing it all over the world: a centralization of the ideas of the marginalized resulting from the romanticized promises of populist politicians capitalizing on the marginalized’s desire to be seen and to be heard, and their optimism that this can be achieved with traditional (but currently inert) means. The marginalized of any society and their representatives in government function according to the postmodern paradigm of dialectical public discourse. To move forward, we must change our paradigm.
As metamodern journalist Seth Abramson has pointed out, true rebellion is not reactionary, rather, it forges a path forward. This a true romantic response to social crisis. It is my proposal that to forge this path in Poland, we must understand our past and how it maintains a vice grip on our interactions and progress. This begins with an examination of our mutual trauma.
Renowned American therapist Resmaa Menakem published a groundbreaking book on the subject of trauma and society, and so I aim to adapt his expertise and ideas to our context in Poland, below. To begin, I’d like to define my usage of the term trauma, so as to make its subsequent use clear for the reader. Whereupon I refer to Menakem’s discussion of the subject:
Contrary to what many people believe, trauma is not primarily an emotional response. Trauma … is a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.
Trauma is not a flaw or a weakness. It is a highly effective tool of safety and survival. Trauma is also not an event. Trauma is the body's protective response to an event—or a series of events – that it perceives as potentially dangerous. This perception may be accurate, inaccurate, or entirely imaginary. In the aftermath of highly stressful or dramatic situations, our [limbic system] may embed a reflexive trauma response in our bodies…
We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for… From the body's viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical, visceral sensations. The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety.
The above should already give astute readers pause, as well as a hint at where this essay is going. But to flesh out the idea of trauma some more, here is another description from author Neil Strauss,
Trauma comes from any abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Think of it this way: every time a child has a need and it's not adequately met, that causes what we define as trauma.... By that definition is there anyone in the world who doesn't have trauma?... probably not... We link and store any experience that brings us fear or pain because we need to retain that information to survive. All you have to do is touch a hot stove once and your behavior around hot stoves changes for the rest of your life – whether you remember getting burned or not. So think of anything in your life that was less than nurturing as a hot stove, and when you encounter something similar as an adult, it can trigger your learned survival response. We have a saying here: if it's hysterical, it's historical ... Most people think of trauma as the result of a serious assault, disaster, or tragedy ... but a small trauma, like a parent criticizing you day in and day out, can be just as damaging because it's happening on a regular basis.
So, we’re all traumatized. Perhaps some readers were already aware of that. I became aware of it through therapy. And as I investigated the roots of my own trauma, I realized it went further back than my fairly normal childhood. This is because trauma responses are physiological and common to everyone. Trauma responses – as consequences arising from engagement with our deepest emotions and attachments – are the domain of our limbic system, the so-called ‘reptile brain’. As with reptiles and other animals, the limbic system only understands survival and protection; it can only instruct our bodies to rest, fight, flee, or freeze. If we are unable to execute one of these commands successfully, our neurology develops management strategies to protect itself. When these strategies are unprocessed, they can be passed on over generations, becoming standard responses in families, communities, and cultures.
How does unprocessed trauma get passed on? Over time, things that may have caused trauma in childhood – e.g. a need not being met, even one as simple as a hug during a tantrum – may be forgotten, but the trauma response is internalized. I will attempt to illustrate this briefly (with a view to avoid getting sidetracked into the realm of child psychology) with an example provided by Dr Gabor Maté. If a child is throwing a tantrum, it is because their limbic system dominates their still-developing pre-frontal cortex and they are unable to manage the associated emotions. If during this tantrum, a child is shut in their room rather than met where they are and seen as they are (i.e. as a child reacting to something unpleasant in the way a child only knows how – by throwing a tantrum), the message from the caregivers to the child is one of non-acceptance. That is, ‘you are to be separated from us because you are not acceptable as you are.’ This might be rationalized differently by the caregiver (e.g. ‘you must learn discipline and we will not accept such behaviour’), but the child’s understanding cannot be the same as the caregiver’s because they are neurologically incapable of processing the situation in the same way. The result is a minor trauma response. The child learns to behave differently because they’re ‘not acceptable’ the way they are. Years pass, that child grows, and forgets the incident, but the trauma is internalized. The trauma response – behaving differently because they’re fundamentally not acceptable – loses context. The adult then has a personality that, unique to them, demonstrates a deep-seated belief that they are not acceptable the way they are. This does not mean the individual cannot function normally or even successfully in society, but in personal relationships, especially intimate ones, the internalized trauma response is usually at the root of any interpersonal issues. When they become a parent however, the tendency to react to ‘unacceptable behaviour’ by their child in the same way their parents did, is highly likely. And this is not simply because parenting is often intuitively learned from one’s own parents, but also because subconsciously, a parent who encounters a tantrum for example, may feel their own behaviour is not being accepted by their own child, and they will be triggered into a trauma response as a result. That trauma response may be anything that re-enacts their trauma: they will innately respond by showing their own child that their behaviour (i.e. the child as who they are, as the child will inevitably interpret it) is unacceptable. In this way, the trauma is passed on. Menakem describes this kind of situation effectively,
This may seem crazy or neurotic to the cognitive mind, but there is bodily wisdom behind it. By recreating such a situation, the person also creates an opportunity to complete whatever action got thwarted or overridden [in their childhood, for example]. … The attempt to reenact the event often simply repeats, re-inflicts, and deepens the trauma. ... When the same strategy gets internalized and passed down over generations within a particular group, it can start to look like culture. Therapists call this a traumatic retention.
Attempts to recreate a traumatic situation, even simply by revisiting it with an emphasis on one’s own suffering, is our human way of seeking validation and thus fulfilling one of our most fundamental needs: being seen and understood. But what happens when we do this as a society, when this revisiting of trauma becomes a part of our culture? That this is particularly relevant to Poland and Polish culture should be obvious to anyone who knows Poland’s history from at least 1939. Consider this using Menakem’s explanation:
This intergenerational transmission [of trauma]... occurs in multiple ways:
· through families in which one family member abuses or mistreats another.
· through unsafe or abusive systems, structures, institutions, and/or cultural norms.
· through genes. Recent work in human genetics suggests that trauma is passed on in our DNA expression, through the biochemistry of the human egg, sperm, and womb.
When I read this in Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, my immediate thought was, ‘if trauma is passed on through DNA expression, wouldn’t the trauma of the Second World War be passed on to the children of the survivors?’ Survivors of Auschwitz who saw their children carried off to the gas chambers. Survivors of ghettoization. Survivors of the Nazi occupation. All of those situations can be described by the second bullet point, above. But of course, those are examples from the Second World War alone. What about the survivors’ children, the baby-boomers? Even if their parents managed to process their trauma (which they didn’t – that generation did not understand trauma), boomers grew up in communist Poland – the reality of which can be wholeheartedly described as having unsafe and abusive systems, structures, institutions, and/or cultural norms. Of that, I should not have to convince any Pole. On top of all this, there are the proverbial abuses of the Catholic Church, well known and openly portrayed in several Polish films of late. Something like 92% of Poles identify as Catholic. Catholicism is a Polish cultural norm. Unfortunately, it is also an occasionally abusive one.
And so Polish culture is a traumatized one. This is underscored by the emphasis of national remembrance of suffering (e.g. the ‘Polska Walczaca’ as symbol of Polish pride and identity, the national collective mourning of the Smolensk disaster) The cold stare I mentioned at the beginning of this essay is one small example of this. The lack of a word for vulnerability is another. To put it more precisely, they are evidence of coping mechanisms for trauma. They come from a trauma response that Menakem calls trauma ghosting. It is the “pervasive sense that danger is just around the corner, or something terrible is going to happen at any moment.” Though this response may make little cognitive sense, it makes perfect sense for our neurology; as Menakem puts it, “it is protecting itself from repeating the experience that caused or preceded the trauma.” It is easy to see how this pervasive sense of danger may have affected an entire nation with a history like that of Poland. Without much hyperbole, ‘a pervasive sense of danger’ may be used to describe the average Polish citizen’s experience for at least 50 years between 1939-1989, with the Nazi occupation followed by the Communist regime. Indeed, any nation that has experienced war or a prolonged sense of collective fear is liable to have internalized their trauma response into their culture. As mentioned in Menakem’s second quote above, when this strategy is internalized, therapists call this traumatic retention. Looking around in Poland then, we see that adaptations to trauma have caused our bodies to “house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our [past].”
But If Polish culture is traumatized, and we all identify with that culture, how is it, you may ask, that we are currently so divided? Well, here’s where it gets interesting.
As indicated above, everyone has experienced trauma in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree. But every one of us has a unique personal and social context. This context provides us with our unique way of responding to trauma. Our various self-defence mechanisms that we use to deal with it are innate and individualized. And so, it is these contexts that create division among us, as a response to trauma.
To illustrate this, one common response is the identification with something greater than ourselves. We are a tribal species, feeling as if we are part of a larger group gives us a sense of security. When we’ve experienced trauma, that larger group becomes our armour. There is nothing inherently harmful about this response, after all, it is innate to our physiology and by protecting us from harm it allows us to continue functioning in society. Issues arise when this larger group becomes something abstract or too large to identify every working part or member, as we might be able to in a tribe. These larger groups often have their own culture. The Scouts have a culture. Football hooligans have a culture. Nationalist groups like ONR have a culture. Catholicism has a culture. Culture is what creates meaning for us in the greater world. A culture, as Menakem puts it,
has elders, rituals, symbols, uniforms, displays, shared terminology and language, stories, mentoring, roles, tittles, awards, codes of behavior, rules of admonishment and belonging, a shared history, a communal vibe (a shared vibrational language), and an explanation of the world and our place in it.
He goes on to articulate how identifying with these cultures is a sort of self-defence:
These can be deeply soothing to the human body – especially a traumatized body. They can also create a deep sense of harmony with other bodies that belong to the organization. And all of these cultural trappings – and the powerful sensations and experiences they engender — are immediately and available to anyone who becomes part of the group and adheres to its structure. More than anything culture creates a sense of belonging – and belonging makes [us] feel safe. This is why culture matters to us so deeply we humans want to belong. ... we experience [belonging] deeply. When we belong, we feel that our life has some value and meaning.
Which groups we identify with, which sub-culture(s) form our identity, is down to our individual context. So, for example, a person traumatized by conservative culture might look to opposing and/or more extreme groups for a sense of belonging, and vice versa. A person traumatized by intergenerational trauma in a personalized way, might look to the first most readily available culture for a sense of belonging outside of their immediate family. Sometimes these cultures can enrich someone’s life, like the Scouts, other times, it can harden the resentment created by their trauma. In rural areas, individuals might find more traditional groups with whom to find belonging like the dogmatic Polish Catholic church or hooligan gangs, whereas in metropolitan areas it may be radical groups like social justice warriors.
Of course, it follows then that one of the consequences of these trauma responses are societal divisions. In late 2020 Poland, these divisions are hardening. Subjective and dichotomous language (e.g., ‘lewica’ vs. ‘prawica’) labels these divisions and thereby crystalizes our separateness. This, in turn, is of course a consequence of the postmodern paradigm of dialectic, which is reductive, antagonistic, and phenomenologically inaccurate. Truth is not contingent. From a species perspective, we are not fundamentally separate. But this age of separation and increasing individualization is also responsible for vitrifying divisions. As humans, this separateness is (subconsciously at the very least) terrifying, and traumatized as we are, we cling even more desperately do our divisive ideologies with which we identify. And now we’ve come to a breaking point. This has exhausted us and our desperation to hold onto a sense of security has made us more aggressive and antagonistic.
And yet, we are a resilient species. Indeed, resilience is built into our cells. As Menakem points out, “resilience is expressed community by a group, family, and organization, or culture.” Poles reading this are undoubtedly already making the historical connections. I refer, of course, to that particularly ardent Polish cultural phenomenon of looking to the nation’s history (particularly that of the 20th century) to build a national identity around the idea of resilience. The cults of Piłsudski, Polska Walcząca, and Solidarność are prime examples. But it is precisely therein, that the problem lies. Relying on such historical examples and then romanticizing them as a means of overcoming personal, communal, or societal insecurity – or more specifically, the aforementioned social trauma – only works to deepen a sense of alienation from the world outside the associated culture (i.e. everything not Polish) but it also necessarily needs an ‘other,’ an enemy, to exist and make narrative sense. In this way, the Polish flavour of resilience is inherently antagonistic, chauvinistic, and anti-social. This is why divisions in Poland are hardening. Furthermore, to criticize that which has provided a fundamental basis for a feeling of security – albeit an unhealthy one – would be to threaten the individual’s or the group’s identity. If you’re Polish and these ideas are all new to you, I would be willing to bet that you’ve been triggered by what you’ve read, if you’ve read this far. See for yourself: do a body scan now. Are you completely relaxed? Sub-cultural divisions in Poland trigger the trauma in each other’s bodies. Listen to the words being used on both sides of the protests in Poland today. The rage points directly to how triggered we are.
We are divided and yes, our culture and history has played into that, mostly because of various forms of trauma, but I shouldn’t like to end this essay on such a negative note. It’s not enough for me to know the core reasons why something happens, to understand the roots of a conflict. My solution-seeking mind wants to know how to assuage the issue. Can we ever alleviate the tension between us? I think we can. We do need a romantic response to crisis, but we need to recognize that that need comes from our collective exhaustion (albeit perhaps subconscious in most cases) with postmodern dialectic. Let us start healing by recognizing the fallaciousness of division. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the philosophy of metamodernism seems to offer a place from which to begin.
Looking at the basic and general societal division in Poland today, metamodern language would point out that both sides of the argument are wrong and they’re both right. They’re wrong because they speak to subjective truth rather than and objective reality that can be embraced by the whole, and they’re both right because they’re true to the individuals who identify with them as they’re usually not able to look at a situation objectively. We’re all subject to this, no matter our position, no matter our trauma, no matter the sub-cultures or ideas with which we identify. At the risk of sounding tautological, our divisiveness is therefore, counterproductive. The organs of change, however, are necessarily a part of it. We must accept that we’ve all been traumatized and work to heal our trauma and create room in our nervous systems for working together. Moving forward, I’ll rely on the expertise of Menakem once more.
[These are] parallel processes, not isolated ones. Simultaneously there needs to be collaboration, coordination, and cooperation among the … groups – especially when it comes to social activism. It's a classic both/and situation. Until then, it's important to recognize that all [groups or subcultures] share many of the same attributes – especially when each group is at its best. These include strength, resilience, courage, creativity, perseverance, and achievement. They need to be recognized, highlighted, lifted up, and passed on within each group, along with supportive stories and practices that are unique to that group. None of [these groups] need to start from scratch. Each can draw on, build on, and in some cases, rediscover its existing talents and achievements.
It’s time to create a new culture. First, let’s take care of ourselves, metabolize our pain, and heal: let’s change lives. Take the best parts of our culture, its strength, resilience, courage, creativity, perseverance, and achievement, and support one another, as Poles, not leftists or conservatives, but as one people, to engage in collective social activism and achieve the progress Poland needs.
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