Things moving fast and slow

or: Towards a sociological theory-bridge with psychology for healing from PTSD.

CW: Suicide, trauma and PTSD.

Hera and I were talking about how time speeds as we grow. In a near inversion of the other: we get bigger, time gets smaller. With that, our sense of place is also reconfigured. The scale of things, people, events over time shrink.

As we drove through Hera’s once-upon-a-time home, Gundagai, she again shared the tale of a local blakfulla who’d saved members of the township during a flood. She also shared the walk from her old house to the pool, something she’d often do early in the morning when it was dark, counting paces and landmarks as she went. With these ‘signs’ (stories, experiences, things), we begin to develop a small snapshot of place which may be enough for us to start anchoring ourselves in relation to it.

Sometimes these signs are ours, other times they’re interpreted, and in some circumstances they may be imposed upon us. These landmarks, stories, histories come to constitute signs of different scales in our minds. To me, Gundagai is a place where my wife spent some time growing up, with some interesting history and a sense of scale developed while driving halfway across a continent. But the subjective experience for Hera scaled, actively, on arrival, in which those experiences, histories, traumas - signs - cracked the long frozen ice. A place, reconfigured, while experienced again.

Herein I’ll use signs to collectively refer to stories, history, landmarks, place, people. Anything you can imagine can be(come) a sign, and it is coloured by your perceptions, experiences, and standpoint in the world. Don’t overthink it¹.

Our eternally current (now) senses of signs and stories change because we grow, or change. Each new experience means our past experience cannot be experienced the same again. Sounds cyclical in the ‘duh’ sense, ey? Or, actually my head hurts. Trying again:

Over time our development brings new perspective. This means we can’t have the same experience twice, because we are always bringing novelty and wisdom to what we face. This means when we revisit signs - from our past that may have been hidden under a boulder - we fracture those that are frozen in place.

For instance, I didn’t like cherries when I was younger, but now my, no wait I still don’t really like cherries. Scratch that ². Point is, I hope you get it.

To me, I suppose, this gives me the feeling like healing is made possible. If we are able to grow, change, and experience things (again) with new perspective, perhaps we can move towards a more healed self. Optimism over despair ³.

Why does this mean we can have optimism?

First, I think cruel optimism gives us a counterpoint to anchor our genuine optimism upon. This is the kind of optimism the colonial/capitalist system wants you to have. Berlant says:

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially. ⁴

But, you’ve attached meaning to the sign, and yet you can’t just drop it because it has organised your sense of who you are and what the good life looks like. We’ll massage this message just a little today, so stay with me. First a final example toward optimism, before I fill you with some despair.

Imagine holding a balloon on a string that you are sure is pulling you somewhere wonderful; but the balloon is actually dragging you backwards (to even worse capitalism). Berlant would say the hard part is not realising the balloon is bad. The hard part is that letting go of the string feels like giving up on the good place you were sure it was taking you, so you keep holding on even though it hurts. Hope for change, for her, is not a happy feeling that lifts you up. Sometimes hope is the string that keeps you stuck. Real change starts when you can let go of the balloon and survive the falling feeling, and find that you can walk to a good place on your own feet instead.

Dropping the balloon

Let’s make some philosophers and sociologists very grumpy by mixing traditions. It’s us-two against the western theoretical canon, bub ⁵.

To me, changing what signs mean to us is a step toward unhappiness. This follows our new friend Berlant, hell it follows Gramsci, if we hold on to reform, subtle reconfiguration, ‘liberalism’, we will inevitably end up back with what we have now, the trauma stays, the system continues, and we’re sitting here thinking: what the fuck?

So, contra that, change also begs the interpellation question; petits récits; canonical and exceptional. No, actually, let’s do Baudrillard (poorly, I disclaim; I’m no Prof. Brabazon). He’ll offer us some clarity and get this waka back on course. To our story:

Place, Gundagai in this instance, did not shrink or become more or less grim; Hera’s relation to an image of it she carried, an image scaled by a younger self, became frozen in her mind. (Re)entering the scene, she realised in returning and finding it smaller that it is not about measurement of the place, it is a crack in the ice of the memory, the sign (the interpretation). Once we find a crack, well, there’s plenty we can do with this both psychologically and sociologically ⁶. But most straightforward, if we pause with our thoughts:

We see the sign was just a frozen picture all along, a memory fractured, a map drawn early, scrawled in pencil, and then mistaken for the actual ground.

Hera’s map, her sign, had come to stand in for the territory so completely that it governed her more than the territory actually does. The felt sense of the place was more real, and more total, than the place. Woof (just me? apply this to other scenarios and maybe you can follow me).

Here, again, I turn to optimism. Through the sharing of the experience of a fractured ice-shard, a disrupted sign, we can come to a new imaginary. Gundagai isn’t scary, it’s not big, it’s not anything except an interpretation - a small country town, a place people live, a collection of stories. It carries different meaning for different people because we all carry diverse experiences. And in fluidity we can find growth through acknowledging and reckoning with that diversity – even if that means we have to acknowledge that some of that diversity includes members of the alt-right National Party. But we won’t accept them as “true”, nor should we accept any sign as representative of a “real” (let’s stop, though, because it gets a bit slippery here with the French philosophers and truth).

So, we can slowly build more accurate personal truth based on the cumulative experience we carry co-created with others. This demands that we work together, collaborate, and open our histories and our stories so we can review them together. And this is just an abstract example, the method underlying this has many possible reconfigurations.

The method? Instead of singularly trusting the picture in your head as the truth, you put your picture next to other people’s pictures of the same thing, and you yarn until you build a fuller, truer picture together that I couldn’t have made alone. A collective standpoint. Have you heard of Storywork⁷, because that’s what we’re doing together right now - you and me, or maybe us-two and us-two, ey?

Also, just the history books I should note, I’ve never been to Gundagai. These realisings happened because I was in dialogue. Yet the pattern we’re finding together is written across our lives in myriad ways. And it’s certainly not just about place, it’s about signs and how those signs are made. Together.

Moving our (the)oretical terrain

Before we travelled through Ngunawal Country, I had the realisation that being tethered to specific places is detrimental to my mental health. This is counter to the significance I actually assign to place: creator, life-giver, possibility, gods, trust, responsibility. In this sense the tethering is a vicarious harm forcibly associated to place, and this is intentional, it is the colonial/capitalist enclosure harm inflicted on almost all humans living.

To me, being stuck – a colonial/capitalist ‘you must be here’ – a demand from the system is highly (re)traumatising. This, partly, because my PTSD arises from surviving sexual assaults, and being trapped. Moreover, during my own reflecting, and the guided psychological work of pulling at threads of memories to unfurl the black hole that is depression and trauma I have come to notice these demands and tethers impact on my life and health. Despite work toward rejecting, re-writing, or reconfiguring them (in so far as I can) they persist and remind me of what I have experienced. This is regularly overwhelming. Dreams invaded by shadowy figures digging away at my soul. Waking otherwise harmless realities snapped back to reliving the “lick my *** or I’ll make you destitute”.

The system’s harm which compounds this also traps me. Such that I am now tethered to Kaurna Country in a way that warps my relationship to that place which should equally carry happy memory and possibility. Instead, I am stuck in vicarious harm from that place, by a system vicariously harming me on behalf of a protected perpetrator through an ongoing legal battle with a University, who themselves have no stakes in winning, other than to see my smouldering ruins laid bare on the mountainside on behalf of an abuser. Vicariously vicarious.

Who’d think being pinned down by a corrupt, antihuman, defiled “University” that has chosen to attempt to destroy my health despite every opportunity it has to do the right thing could be so harmful. But I digress, this is not time to tell that tale; it deserves its own telling at the right moment.

I share this only because last week, to a far lesser extent, I had experienced a tethering to Narrm. Near instantly, suicidal ideation entered my conscious mind again for the first time in about a month while I awaited the possibility of in-patient mental health care. If you think getting mental health care in Australia is easy, particularly when you are practically destitute, you are sorely mistaken.

This moment passed, with the support of medical professionals and family, and I have come to a better understanding of my own condition for having grappled with it (again). Further, I think I have found a trigger, a sign, which could use some fracturing. This means more hard work to do, but the process of realising and recognising these signs is genuine work and often the hardest part is coming to understand how they are interacting with us or governing us in the first place.

When you carry PTSD it becomes important to try and identify and understand your triggers. These might spiral us into spaces we never thought we would go, could put us in moods that don’t relate to the moment we’re in, or can drive us in extreme circumstances to want to run into heavy traffic. In a cruel twist of fate, if someone else identifies your trigger, or until you have gone in-through-out, you will react against such an understanding with all the defences you can muster.

None of this is me freestyling, for what it’s worth. The psychology sits pretty easily with it. And we may as well trust psychologists as much as philosophers (in to say, not all that much). The bones are just plain conditioning: somewhere in the assault a neutral cue, a smell, a touch, a landmark or room, got soldered onto the fear, and after that the cue on its own is enough to fire the whole thing on instant replay™ all over again ⁸.

I’ve been circling Ehlers and Clark, in the above, who believe the reliving runs on trauma memories that got filed badly and on triggers that are weirdly specific and not remotely logical … signs that are misfiled and misrecognised … such that the work is learning to tell ‘then’ from ‘now’. Not just keeping a list of what sets me off, but actually separating sign from signified ⁹. And at the run-into-traffic end of things, the way the appearance of the sign (the cue, if you like) drags my whole nervous system somewhere I never agreed to go, has a name in the somatic camp a window of tolerance, where the trigger throws you clean past the edge of what you can deal with and noticing that is half the job of sitting back down, letting some tears fall, and reaching for a valium, not a highway ¹⁰. Which is roughly where the frozen picture wanders back into frame.

Now, I believe I owe you a weaving of these two somewhat discrete ecosystems of understanding into something more rounded. If I were an academic I might ‘argue’ that the trigger and the sign are the same animal, described by two disciplines that never share notes (too busy glaring at each other across the university’s plaza, never actually helping anyone). The trigger is the young person’s frozen image of the place they grew up in coming into contact with the place, the thing working below the surface to shape how and what they experienced; what we have been calling a sign is that same frozen picture, read off the other discipline’s chart. When the trigger activates (in the psychological sense), what is actually firing is the sign, and on firing it does one of three things: freezes more water around itself, cracks, or recombobulates entirely (I don’t make the metaphors around here). And here is where the two finally meet. A sign, put cleanly, is a unit of meaning that has come loose from any real reference point and now runs on its relation to other signs. Psychology’s cruel addition is that loose or not, cut off from the real or not, it can still fire the whole body as though that reference point were standing right in front of you. The map drags the territory around by the collar (sound anything like colonisation to anyone else?).

Touching grass, and patting cows

The French philosophers really are something else. Let me play this back slowly because I get lost here, probably more than you do. Don’t worry, this is my first rodeo and I don’t much like animal torture.

Imagine you have never seen a real cow, but you have seen so many cartoon cows, cow emojis, and milk cartons that the cartoon becomes the “real” cow in your head, and an actual cow in a field looks wrong. The sign is the cartoon cow that took over the spot where the real one might be.

In our terms, here, it means the trigger of our PTSD spiral does not connect us to a real event, an active trauma being witnessed. Parking, for a moment, new trauma (experienced) may be a trigger itself of past trauma (around and around we go). For the most part, our triggers are, instead, small and harmless. A smell, a sound, a word, a place that otherwise means very little. The moment does not hurt us, it just resembles the sign. And away we go; the sign does the rest. It fires ahead of us, it fires us up, it mobilises our nervous systems, and the real thing is usurped, the picture wins over the present. And it fucking sucks.

With that enmeshed connection to the stored sign, the trigger, it takes the real’s place. That sign now feels more real and more total than the moment we are actually in.

We drove into Gadigal late last night, and one of these event-come-triggers hit me square in the face. Feeling surprisingly emotionally resourced, but exhausted after a week of imagined visitation by heavy objects crushing me to death, I managed to evade the spiral. I drove past a place in which I suddenly remembered an early assault from my (one of my) abuser(s), a deeply invasive moment in front of another (former) colleague in a taxi. Instead of giving into the spiral, I named the thing. Shared the moment with Hera.

Our bud Baudrillard would probably say something like ‘you cannot read a map while you are standing on it’, because ‘from inside it is just the world’. Ouch, mate, the cruelty of it, and the map (haha French Philosopher go pop). The defences go up against us, or anyone, naming the map because, to me, it is not a map yet, it is the actual terrain. But here we’ve hit the limit of Baudrillard (Sorry Prof, I did my best).

If we let our bud have his day, and give him a little extension (I mean, peine forte et dure after all), we could let him have the in-through-out. But he would see this as the only way the picture cracks from the inside, the only way the saturation thins enough. He kind of boxes himself into a cascade of simulations/signs.

As we moved further from Narrm, I began to feel lighter. Despite the background recurrent crushing feelings: a sense of mortal danger, and a fear lurking just around the corner which never ceases; the departure felled a colonial tether. This break brought with it the realisation of the trigger. The feeling of being trapped. Latched to place by someone else’s designs.

Growing, leaving, the drive across to Ngunawal Country, these put distance between me and the scene and let the picture come loose. Baudrillard would have left us stranded here, no outside, no place to look and to see the crack, just one simulation sliding into the next. The PTSD is what gives me the outside he would not grant. It is the proof the saturation can lift, that what felt like the whole ground was a sign all along, scaled and installed early and, eventually, able to be set down.

As I’ve grown, I believe I have begun to lose my sense of the scale of place. On the other hand, the prominence of the stories, non-fiction, which either steer or hold space in my life have outgrown, outrun, outpaced me. This is my experience of PTSD, but it is also my experience of optimism for change. Changing the story. Changing what I care for. Changing my attention. And that comes more from psychology than it does sociology.

Younger, opinionated me is literally spinning in his electrified grave (I had the motor installed because peine forte et dure may as well apply to young Marxists, too).

Sometimes we have to allow things to move so we can move on. We need to let go of the balloon thread that we keep shouting up at from below to become a unicorn. It won’t, and if it does, you’ll just be holding its tail while it shits on you. Build a new world instead.

As to healing, this will take time. My own journey feels ever fractured and restarted. New signs and countersigns developed constantly. Progress replaced with vigilance. I know it will be a journey of many years. However, and with apologies to the post-truth movement, it’s not impossible. And we can find a way, us-two, to good story.

Footnotes

1. Oh go on then, I’m not your mum. Lord knows I overthought it as I re-wrote it 5 times. ↩

2. Still not overthinking it. ↩

3. but also fuck right off and die in a fire Chomsky: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-files-noam-chomsky ↩

4. https://tableau.uchicago.edu/articles/2022/04/excerpt-%E2%80%9Ccruel-optimism%E2%80%9D ↩

5. I mean, only if you’re on team fuck the establishment, otherwise we might have beef (but only the beef made out of soy protein, I don’t fuck with cows). ↩

6. Get your mind out of the gutter! ↩

7. Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork is one interpretation of this as method, and might interest you https://www.ubcpress.ca/indigenous-storywork ↩

8. Mowrer, O. H. (1960). Learning Theory and Behavior. Wiley. The two-factor idea of how fear gets learned and then kept alive by avoidance. ↩

9. Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(4), 319-345. ↩

10. Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind. Guilford Press. Origin of the “window of tolerance”, later taken up in somatic trauma work by Ogden and others. ↩