I’ve been helping my friend from another country navigate the legal system, green card in hand, and a husband who attempted to suffocate her to death. The people in both camps — defense and prosecution — are interestingly together bedfellows, working the “system” hard, juggling which judge is this or that (pro- or con-), and using all the ugliness of a legal system that is stacked against, well, JUSTICE for one, JUSTICE for all.
Her case gets delayed, and delayed, and the accused is still in jail, awaiting a trial, and then new (sic) evidence pops up, and alas, more moves by defense team (at taxpayer’s expense) rallies to get the case delayed but hoping for the release of the accused from jail.
Not so much vicarious trauma for her, but first-hand, and then repeated, and generational, and the trauma of this abuser and his own life trauma and Breaking Bad family line, the mean cuss father, and well, self-numbing, self-slobbering boozing.
Trauma, and then, just the prosecution and the defense of it all. Ahh, two agencies in Oregon, fighting for $$: OPDS and ODAA.
“The clients you represent through contracts with OPDS have been found indigent and unable to afford their own attorney or costs associated with defending themselves and their families against the accusations brought by the State,” Singer wrote in a Dec. 28 letter announcing the decision. “Neither the clients themselves nor OPDS is responsible for paying fees to learn what evidence the State has regarding its allegations.”
District attorneys have largely objected to the policy change.
Michael Wu, executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association, referenced a Nov. 30 letter to OPDS asking that they continue to pay for discovery until after the 2022 legislative session.
“Prosecutorial resources are already stretched by a historic backlog of cases resulting from widespread court closures across the duration of the pandemic,” the ODAA letter states. “We again request that you delay this action long enough for the issue to be addressed by the 2022 Legislature.”
Singer said he supports local prosecutors being properly funded, especially to defray the costs of providing constitutionally-mandated discovery.
“If they’re not being properly funded to defray these costs, I’ll sit at the table with them at the Legislature and support their request for funding. But they need to get that funding directly from the Legislature, not through the public defense system,” he said.
OPDS and ODAA are scheduled to discuss fees later this month.
It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have. (source)
Again, everything in Capitalism is broken, and as Lloyd Ratheon Austin gets trillions more for his Mafia, we in the world of the 80 Percent are screwed, and that third-hand putrid economic and structural violence smoke filling our already screwed first-hand trauma burn in our lungs, well, think of death by a thousand vicarious traumas.
A recent study showed that Oregon needs roughly 1,300 more full-time attorneys – or roughly three times the number it currently has – to represent everyone charged with a crime who cannot afford a lawyer.
Oregon differs from other states in that it relies entirely on contracts with public defenders rather than keeping them on staff. The agency currently has about 100 firms on contract.
[…]
According to Oregon’s public defense agency, violating the constitutional right to legal counsel and a speedy trial has serious consequences, including wrongful convictions, threats to public safety, and an increase in the number of cases returning to trial years after a conviction.
Until July 2022, attorneys who contracted with the agency on an hourly rate made $105 per hour for murder cases. Since then, the agency bumped up the rate to $158 per hour for attorneys taking on cases of people in custody. Now, the agency will implement a tiered hourly rate, ranging from $125 to $200 depending upon the seriousness of the case, regardless of whether or not the person is in custody. (source)
Ahh, so all the charges, all the traffic stops, all the fines, the harassment of people for bad checks and bad lawns, and, yes, many accused are over-charged and innocent, ahh, just getting into the criminal justice system as a WITNESS or VICTIM will age you. However, in Domestic Violence cases, the reality is that once the cops are called, there is a very high chance of that woman being truly afraid of being, well, murdered. Say, what, you want data? Read the other pieces here:
Females Citing Domestic Abuse Face Murderers Every Day
Once You Call 911, Your Journey Will Be Long, Challenging and Fraught with Hurdles
Again, the United Messes of America:
The Oregon legislature approved release of the $100 million in special purpose appropriation funds which will be broken up like this:
- $70.3 million for the Criminal Trial Division
- $14.6 million for Nonroutine Expenses
- $5 million for Court Mandated Expenses
- $10.2 million for the Juvenile Division
Some lawmakers voted against releasing these funds because they thought it was too much money, but the vote ultimately passed.
“It’s a mess,” Senator Peter Courtney said. “When we deal with right to counsel…it’s not Republican or Democrat.” (sources)
And so it goes — trauma, second hand trauma, care giver trauma, trauma informed care, PTSD, C-PTSD, latency PTSD, collective PTSD, mass hysteria, mass formation … psychosis: MASS FORMATION!
Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.
There are four key components needed for an environment to experience a mass formation psychosis: lack of social bonds or decoupling of societal connections, lack of sense-making (things don’t make sense), free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent. Free-floating anxiety is a general sense of uneasiness that is not tied to any particular object or specific situation. (From many interviews of Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (June 23, 2022)
So, vicarious trauma, and vicarious trauma training (which the victims assistance people in my county just went through), it is all part of a decaying society, from heavy caseloads, to vicious retrogrades who want all people dead, locked up, without safety nets, and it is there, within the care givers, stuck in their top down lives as workers, with these sychophants above, and the money money money and defunding and threats of budget cuts, and the caseloads out the roof, and the more and more people living Breaking Bad lives, truly, a society that has been scoured of intelligence, agency, community purpose, and, alas, has been put into a Netflix and Facebook Isolation Screen Scrolling Black Mirror Chamber, what can we expect then, this TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA?
GAD, man, General Anxiety Disorder? What the fuck is that?
Vicarious Trauma: “It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have.”
It gets multilayered:
Vicarious trauma was first identified in 1980s as the “cost of caring” (Figley, 1982). It is sometimes referred to as “compassion fatigue” (Perlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Symptoms can parallel those of PTSD – re-experiencing, numbness, avoidance, and persistent arousal (Figley, 1996).
Professionals working with survivors of trauma (e.g. sexual assault) report changes to how they see the world – for example, that the world is not just or safe (Salston & Figley, 2003). Professionals with previous trauma histories show significantly higher secondary trauma symptoms than those with no trauma histories (Folette, Polusny, & Milbeck, 1994).
Definition of Vicarious Trauma
+ The emotional residue of exposure to traumatic stories and experiences of others through work; witnessing fear, pain, and terror that others have experienced; a pre-occupation with horrific stories told to the professional (American Counseling Association, 2016)
+ Sometimes referred to as “secondary traumatization, secondary stress disorder, or insidious trauma” (ACA, 2016)
+ Included in the DSM-5 as part of the cluster of “trauma and stressor-related disorders”
+ Vicarious Trauma is not the same as “burnout”
Definition of Compassion Fatigue
+Beyond empathy, it is also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time.
+ Can happen quite quickly (as opposed to vicarious trauma or burnout) and is responsive to evidence-based treatment interventions
Definition of Controlled Empathy
+ Constant monitoring of emotions so as to not react to stories and testimony, absorbing the information without showing emotion
+ Requires vigorous neurological activity:
• Autonomic empathy – involves both sides of the brain, reacting to stories with appropriate emotion, allows brain to react, release tension
• Controlled empathy – taking control of the empathic response and taxing the right hemisphere of the brain
Definition of Burnout
+ Long term stress reaction and process that occurs among professionals who work with people in some capacity (Freudenberger, 1974; Maslach, 1982; Maslach and Schaufeli, 1993)
+ Can be brought about by workplace conflict, overload of responsibilities, perception of inequality and inadequate rewards, and consistent exposure to traumatic materials (Chamberlain and Miller, 2008)
+ Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment
+ Feelings of being emotionally overextended, depleted or self-doubt
+ Increasing disillusionment (Edelwich and Brodsky, 1980)
+ End result – depersonalization and apathy (source)
So, we are all products of trauma, and many traumas, indeed. The collective trauma, and vicarious trauma, man oh man, just watching the news, or watching the lips moving on a Trump or Biden or Harris or Pence. Our fucking history, and the instantaneous cruel work of pigs of NaziLandia and Racism and Misogyny!
Imagine the lifestyles and fortunes and perversions of the rich and famous constantly bombarding youth, and chipping away at the middle class wanting more hoarding.
Imagine the devaluing of human life that the perverse at the top, in the EU or Israel or USA, UK, you name the society, imagine that constant hatred of the weak, infirm, poor, misbegotten, old, disabled, bad Zip Code useless breather and eater and worker, imagine that collective and deep-veined trauma, pulling us apart one stroke and diabetes case at a time?
Some wisdom in trauma, according to Gabor Mate: It’s 90 minutes!
Yet, oh yet, Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:
“If you get gored by a rhino, you’re going to have a stress response,” Robert Sapolsky said. “There’s no amount of meditation you can do that’s going to prevent that. It doesn’t matter what your self-esteem is like.
“But if you think about mortality and global warming, if you think about how you’re going to pay the bills, if you think about how you got rejected back when (and) you’re always going to fail … if you get mired in the real stress of human psychological turmoil, we differ enormously as to how readily we can keep things in perspective.”
Dennis Anderson, a mental health counselor in Spokane, used Sapolsky’s “Zebras” book instead of a traditional textbook in a class about stress and coping he taught for EWU’s psychology department.
By explaining to therapy patients what’s happening to them on a physiological level – whether it’s a result of anxiety or marital or financial problems – he can help provide a reason to change, he said, especially considering the long-term health effects of stress.
Sometimes people don’t realize long-term stress persists in the “background” of daily life, Anderson said. Meanwhile, those glucocorticoids are pounding away.
“They think of stress as you get fired from your job, or you get in a car wreck – you get in these big things that happen to us,” he said. “But all these little micro-stressors – you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re working in an environment that is a hostile environment – it recedes into the background. It becomes, ‘Oh, that’s what normal is.’?” (source)
Yet oh yet, I see daily the families, the individuals in a township, the big time news, or the state news, or the global news, how destructive these people are in dog-eat-dog world of “I’ve got mine, good luck getting yours” mentality. The endless eugenics of Capitalism, of war as a method of depopulation, of sanctions and stopping medicines to people, to humans. It was all worth it, this Jewish war monger, right?
So, Sapolsky was in Spokane, on my radio show, and at Eastern Washington University, talking to the crowd. And so was this monster, with a huge speaker’s fee of $75,000 for a puny school to dish out?
People ask me how I can rant and rail and deploy polemics and look at the underbelly of life and systems and civilization ALL the time? Come on, it is part and parcel some of our existences. Do I soak in and absorb and inhale all that supposed vicarious trauma? Or, do I relish the people who are there pushing and prodding and pulling and digging and emoting and expressing what the underpining of our decaying society is about?
Do I need emotional air sickness bags when I explore the darker realm, the entire Fortune 5,000 realm, the realm of geniuses who do and make and ask what and how, but never WHY? Sure, air sickness bag is for temporary stomach trauma.
You betcha, seeing Gates or Thiel or Nuland or Zelensky or the 400 top showboaters in DC, or anyone on Wall Street, or, well, you understand all the who’s in the world that produce vomitus.
The endorsement of Kissinger by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and, eventually, by Clinton, has normalized him, making his views a central part of American statecraft by casting him as a fount of establishment gospel—a gospel that preaches the value of American humanity and accepts as necessity the casual destruction of other people and places. Normalization of this sort, also perpetuated by figures in the media, policy experts, and academics, is dangerous. It transforms the deplorable into the acceptable. Donald Trump is now trying to make such a shift; there is no guarantee that he will fail. Kissinger offers a lesson in how to succeed, by never disavowing and never apologizing, and by relentlessly persuading others of the legitimacy of his diplomacy. (Author and refugee: Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Atlantic 16 Nov 2016)
Is it all vicarious, and am I seeing my body break down at 66 because of all the exposure to the toxins of Capitalism Hasbara/Propaganda/Media/Miseducation? Who the hell knows, and stress is stress, and sure, I am always on the run, fight or fight or fight, and never freeze or flight. But that is just me, and a few million others I know are out there.
Does this shake me to the core? This killer is 100 years cold today!
Oh, come on. If you have been a human your whole life — age 13 or 60 — you know what is real and what is foul.
Go on the dark side and read a hero, Doug Valentine:
The book in essence recounts Valentine’s journey of discovery—as if in a Joseph Conrad novel—about the dark side of the U.S. empire.
Valentine’s political awakening occurred at the age of fourteen on the day JFK was assassinated when he told his father excitedly that they had caught the culprit. Douglas Valentine, Sr., responded in a rather kindly voice: “The guy they got didn’t do it, Doug. You can count on that.”
[…]
Valentine tells a story about how the OSS recruited a Kiowa Indian and Japanese Nisei with connection to the leader of the Black Dragon Society, a paramilitary ultra-nationalist group, for a suicide mission into Nagasaki which was obliterated by the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945, along with 400 allied prisoners of war.
Valentine sees the mission as a parable for how U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate minority groups and use right-wing criminals—who are discarded or killed with little thought after their utility has run out.
This modus operandi fits a long trend in U.S. history going back to the Indian Wars and slavery, an inescapable part of the country’s DNA.
Valentine writes that the United States, like all of North and South America, is “brimming with hungry ghosts invisible to its militant Christian nationalists—the millions of indigenous people who were slaughtered and African-Americans who were enslaved and lynched.”
There are also the ghosts of millions of Southeast Asian peoples whom the same militant Christian nationalists believed were “better dead than red,” along with the millions of victims of the drug trade that the CIA oversaw through the Cold War. (sources)
Read him. You WILL not get VICARIOUS trauma by being informed. Really!
[Photo: Douglas Valentine with his father, Douglas Valentine, Sr.]
[Doug at 73 years of age.]
“The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.”
“We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”
“Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, ‘how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’”
Daniel Quinn
