Hello, friends. This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib. Trauma is a relationship to time,

but it's a strange relationship, a surprising relationship. I think the way that trauma is

often conceived of is there's been some event or an impression of an event that planted a flag or a stake or drew a line

in the past and that we become tethered to that, that we can't move in a way as a result of it.

So that if you imagine someone tetherether to a stake in the ground,

you can imagine some of the things that would happen if they try to run away from it.

And those would look like trauma responses, shaking, shuddering, paralysis, seizures.

And then, of course, there's the element of the displacement of time, the way that time feels strange when a traumatic event is happening.

As a result, a lot of models of trauma have to do with looking at where that stake was planted or that flag and pulling it out of the ground.

Maybe the thought is if we just kind of undo that somehow, we'll return to a pre-traumatic state

or be healed or recover from the trauma.

Perhaps that works for some people, but it might be interesting to think of what trauma is if it wants to move with us.

In other words, if this event or impressions of events wants to move with us in our present

and into our future, and it's asking us to move, to keep pace with it in a way, so that maybe

we're the ones that aren't moving, that the trauma isn't a static thing that just creates a feeling of

recursion of the past, but it's actually a living and dynamic thing that's constantly unfolding

and can offer something to us. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that you base what you do with your trauma on this.

However, it will open up a bit more in the episode with someone who is a professional,

the psychoanalyst Avi Sakatopolu.

Right now, the world is a generator of mass future trauma.

Of course, the world is always generating trauma, but it's rarely been as obvious in my lifetime and probably yours as it is now.

We can really anticipate a future of people dealing with the violence done to them or their families or having done violence

...