Symptomatic Steadfastness: Politicizing Trauma with Lara Sheehi

Based on your observations and experience, what are the psychological impacts of the ongoing war and displacement you’re seeing in Lebanon?

The most pressing thing I am seeing and hearing is psychic intrusion. We see the ways in which the Zionist entity is attempting to intrude on people’s minds, their sense of self, and their safety in their own reality. The intent is not just to destabilize people’s external worlds: destroying buildings, ecosystems, and networks of care, which they have been doing for decades. The events of the past year in Gaza, and now the extension into Lebanon, also have a pointed psychological objective. The logic of the genocidal apartheid state is being used in both Gaza and Lebanon, which shows us that the two are connected in a concerted psychological warfare campaign.

What symptoms typically arise from psychological warfare?

I hear people over and over again saying, “I feel like I’m going crazy.” This is not because they don’t understand what is happening. If you talk to people, they can locate the source of violence. They know with extreme preciseness what is actually happening and, in many ways, what needs to be done to eliminate it, politically and socially. Psychological warfare, however,  works by intruding on the territory of the mind — making people’s reality feel confused. For example, global media campaigns work to deny the reality that people witness and intimately experience every single day. This follows the logic of abuse by repeatedly telling people that what they are seeing is not actually happening. Colloquially, this is called “gaslighting.” The impact is a visceral loss of any sense of reality that we see people starting to feel, in their bodies, and in their minds.

They feel as though they are not able to “reality test,” even though they are absolutely connected to all aspects of reality. I sometimes hear people say, “It feels like I am constantly exaggerating” when trying to describe the ongoing violence. There is a sense that they have to convince everyone of what is going on, despite the fact that we have more evidence than we’ve ever had, perhaps in the history of the world's atrocities.

 The Zionist entity is attempting to intrude on people’s minds, their sense of self, and their safety in their own reality.

In terms of symptoms, people report emotional exhaustion because a lot of energy is expended in trying to translate tragic material realities to the world. When that translation feels like it is failing, it gets turned inwards and people begin to doubt themselves. This is central to the sense of confusion.

People have been reporting difficulty sleeping and concentrating. These are symptoms of having to navigate worlds turned upside down while being expected to continue living as if nothing is happening under conditions that are structurally pathological. The innate response to this is the appearance of all these physical symptoms.

As a psychoanalytic psychologist, what advice do you have for coping with, soothing, or possibly even adapting to the ongoing violence?

Any starting point to this question is to always go back to the original condition, that of colonialism. This cannot be the responsibility of the individual in isolation. It is the responsibility of all of us, communally. It cannot be the burden of the most vulnerable to have to prove their reality to us. I am advocating for a radical redistribution of responsibility for reality testing as a means to challenge the mode of action of colonial abuse that constantly aims to bend realities, in tandem with the logic of Zionism.

If we normalize the demand of oppressive systems to go on normally, we are tasking people with impossible burdens in the midst of them having to do the labor of survival.

Lebanon and Palestine exist under a condition of settler colonialism that is aided by empire and racial capitalism. These forces are perpetually reconstituting themselves, and we have a duty to ask ourselves: What, in those conditions, creates the possibilities for the suffering that we witness and experience? When we dedicate collective efforts to understand those possibilities and how they intimately and disproportionately impact all of us, we create space for the most vulnerable to do the healing that is most pressing and most important to them. If we fall into the trap of reality-bending, by normalizing the demand of oppressive systems to go on normally, we are tasking people with impossible burdens in the midst of them having to do the labor of survival.

I think about coping in terms of what we all have to be doing to create the possibility for everyone to engage in healing processes. In Lebanon, sectarianism is the system that prevents any space for the creation of conditions that would make healing possible or allow  individuals and communities to exist outside of its paradigm. We can trace it back to larger conditions that make it thrive, such as racial capitalism and Zionism, and can start working from there.

Another way of coping is to collectively remind ourselves and our communities that there are people who care, who have always cared, and who will continue to care. Israel’s psychological warfare attempts to propagate the idea that the world has forgotten about us, that nobody will fight our fight, and that they [Zionists] are right next to us, merely a village away.

This is a classic deflective technique that takes the focus off them as the perpetrator. For those of us not in our homeland, we have a duty to uphold the narrative that the entire world has changed in the past year. Gaza changed the world, and it did so at a very high price. And if Gaza changed the world, it means that it also changed Lebanon. Globally, there are solidarity networks that have been reignited around an anti-colonial liberation struggle of the Global South, to which Lebanon belongs.

We also have to de-exceptionalise Lebanon. The idea that somehow Lebanon is special or different among Arab nations is one way in which it has been isolated, forcing everyone to feel atomized and alienated from other Arab populations who share a similar fate. This alienation causes more suffering. If we could think about the current situation in Lebanon as an extension of the global solidarity network engaging in an anti-colonial fight, we can comprehend that the fight for the liberation of Palestine means a fight for the liberation of Lebanon and for all people suffering under the hegemony of empire and colonialism. In this, we challenge the isolation of Lebanon as it produces the desperation that settler colonialism relies on.

How do you interpret the emotional responses you’re seeing in the context of Lebanon’s politics and history, like the war, the Israeli occupation, and the genocide in Gaza?

I begin with the recognition that systems of oppression and power rely on our amnesia and on the dismemberment of communities. There has been a concerted effort for decades, and certainly within the last several years in Lebanon with the revolution, the economic crisis, the explosion, and COVID-19, to dislocate history. Every moment becomes a new moment that people have to come to terms with. The August 4, 2020, Beirut Port explosion lies within a larger history of necropolitical class interests where our warlords animate sectarianism to fight each other publicly, but in reality form a united class front to stabilize their power.

Thinking about trauma as a “point in time” phenomenon essentially lets the aggressor off the hook: A trauma without a traumatiser.

When we reach back into our history of a joint struggle with Palestine, we form an antagonistic relationship to this formation, allowing us to refuse to dislocate history as well as the present reality. I think if we can keep the condition in mind, and understand that all these moving pieces are weapons of psychological warfare with the objective of repressing an entire people, then we can form a solid counterforce against the demands of dislocation and dismemberment, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes and speaks about.

Traumatic events therefore need to be tracked in pattern and not as singular moments in time. Psychologically, an event perceived as “a stand alone moment in time” to me runs parallel to how the trauma industry interprets trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), focusing on “point in time” traumas. These are incidents happening in distinction from the larger condition that allowed them to take place to begin with.

“Point-in-time trauma” is a depoliticized understanding of violence, dislocated from the historical context. It would have us focus more on naming the trauma to treat it, rather than recognizing and dismantling the traumatizer that caused it. This is another deflection meant to derail us from recognising an incident as one of many in a larger pattern of suffering caused by systems of oppression. Thinking about trauma as a “point in time” phenomenon essentially lets the aggressor off the hook: A trauma without a traumatiser.

In the context of Lebanon, we can see this playing out with the forced forgetfulness around the Lebanese also being a colonized people, whether by “Mother France” or the Zionist entity. This feeds further into the narrative of Lebanon’s exceptionalism. We need to bring back into focus and be militantly clear about who and what is causing the trauma. It should be clear at this particular moment that a genocidal Zionist apartheid machine backed by world powers and the US empire is enacting this violence. That unbending statement in itself has the potential to connect us back to our history and root us in what a counterforce against a dislocated trauma can be.

In your practice, do you see signs of resistance and steadfastness reflected in the emotional symptoms that people are experiencing?

Being symptomatic means we understand the violence that is being done to us. For decades, there was investment in “the myth of the phoenix” which is tied to Lebanon’s exclusivization. The Lebanese have been tasked with being so special in their resilience that they can withstand any level of violence and any campaign of exploitation, extraction, and domination, whether by their own corrupt leaders or by external entities. They rise “like the phoenix,” appearing unharmed and ready for a new lease on life. This myth, whether we believe it or not, and whether we recognize its orientalizing gaze or not, can promote the idea that to resist is to not be symptomatic. We need to challenge this narrative.

Symptoms are never absent, so it is a matter of how we view and understand them. We need to divest from the idea that all symptoms are pathological — something that modern psychology is fixated on. It is important to remind ourselves and others that it is crucial to feel the depth of the violence that is being committed

This is not a contradiction to what I was saying about resisting psychic intrusions. We can be both symptomatic as a practice of our humanity and also refuse to let [oppressive systems] force despair down our throats. This is steadfastness. Amidst all the suffering, we see and hear of people from all over Lebanon engaging in immense generosity, communal linking, rejection of sectarianism, and grassroots efforts on the ground to help the forcibly displaced.

We can be both symptomatic as a practice of our humanity and also refuse to let oppressive systems force despair down our throats. This is steadfastness.

We are all used to being bombarded with Lebanon’s dysfunction. We know this story and feel it intimately. But this is not the only story that exists, even if we are primed to have it be the central one. Revolutionaries such as Bassel al-Araj tell us that our work, socially and politically, is “to remain tender and enchanted with the world.” Materially, this means that we have a duty to attune to seeing the beauties of life-making that happen every day. This is not being pollyannaish and denying all the suffering, nor is it an elaboration of the depoliticized myth of the phoenix. Rather, it is the insistence on continuing to live and resist the conditions that seek our death — this is their reason for dropping 900-kg bombs to ensure that layers of life are eviscerated. Remember that. If life is thriving despite the suffering, power attacks it with a counter-force of death.

I see, I hear, and I am connected to so many sources of life and sustenance, and attuning to that is just as important as allowing ourselves to feel the fear, the pain, and the grief. This is how we resist our dehumanization that turns us into something killable and disposable. We are a full people with a full range of emotions and depth, ones that have a rich revolutionary history to reach into, remember, and continue forward. This is not a romanticization. It is just insisting that we will continue to resist in order to live.