Secondary traumatization occurs when a person hears or watches an account of horrendous, shocking, or sickening events and is traumatized from the hearing or seeing rather than from being a part of them.
I spent eight years as a refugee adjudicator/human-rights decision maker with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, listening to stories of genocide, gang rape, torture, etc. I know what secondary traumatization is and is like.
The interesting thing is that you might say to me, can you give me an example? Well, no. It might traumatize you and you wouldn’t be very happy with my inappropriateness or lack of discernment.
They’d be things we don’t run across in our daily lives and hope we never will. They’d be things we wouldn’t even see depicted in movies. The movies would not be allowed to be aired for fear of traumatizing the audience.
So you see the bind.
I watched an episode of David Zublick’s Dark Outpost on Frazzeldrip, with related photographs. Oh my gawd. Trauma, trauma, trauma, surpassing anything I’d heard (save Rwanda) at the Board. (1)
And I’d heard tales of … well, if I were to say, again I might traumatize you … things you never want to hear about or know go on on Planet Earth.
So I’m reading a whole lot more than I’m sharing because I (and probably we) don’t want to shock you. In a sense, we’re being what I’ve called “honest witnesses to the truth.” (2) That means I know some of what’s going on out there and, yes, I’m not going to post on that. My not posting on it is my testimony.
I think the best practice for one in my position is to allow those better suited to do it.
For me that’s the Q Alliance, Earth Alliance, however you wish to call the white hats. They appear to know what they’re doing.
In the meantime, you see me go back and forth, back and forth with this issue, trying to find the ground under my feet.
Now we’re a spiritual niche blog. But Michael has let us know that, after the Reval, we will expand.
There’ll be so much happening then for me (GAoG, Michaelangelo Fund, Michaelangelo & Partners), there won’t be time to find the ground under my feet. It’ll be showtime.
We’ll all of us probably have to go with what we’ve been able to cleanse, purify, and liberate so far.
Footnotes
(1) It was some time before I was able to talk about it to the extent of identifying what it was that threw me for such a loop at Xenia Retreat Centre.
Here’s a later description of the spiritual experience I had – the sight of the Self in the deepest part of the heart – which pulled me out of the dismay I felt after watching Dark Outpost:
“At Xenia Retreat Center, I dove deeply into my heart, in meditation, to find out what the origin was of the feeling of dismay I was experiencing. I thought I’d get to the original incident and experience it through to completion. Instead I went way past the level of the vasanas and kept on going.
“I finally reached what resembled a tunnel and at the end of it was the Light of the Self. And in the presence of the Self I felt innocent and pure.
“I had penetrated through the hridayam, the heart aperture, into the open heart and down, down, down to ‘the seat of the soul.’ So I can vouch for the fact that the seat of the soul is in the heart. That no longer sounds like a far-fetched notion to me, but something I’ve experienced and realized.” (“The Heart is ‘the Seat of the Soul’,” December 17, 2018, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/12/17/the-heart-is-the-seat-of-the-soul/.)
The sight of the Self I had was toned down, as the Divine Mother acknowledged in a reading.
She said, otherwise “you would have departed the life that you have designed – yes, with us – for yourself, for the service you are providing – you would have departed and simply said, ‘I do not need to do this. I will just simply sit in the bliss of love and good luck, everybody!’” (Divine Mother in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Oct. 26, 2018.)
(2) See “Every Society Needs Honest Witnesses to the Truth,” January 5, 2021, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2021/01/05/every-society-needs-honest-witnesses-to-the-truth/