If you are anything like me, you're over this election already. Is it the most stressful campaign ever? But it is reminding me of something that is important to me. I am reminded that we could all do with a dose of self-determination. It is important for our mental well-being. And particularly important for healing from traumatic experiences.

Why is talking about trauma important?

I worked as a counsellor for 15 years, mostly working with people who had a history of severe trauma during their childhood. When I was starting out in counselling, I was lucky to get into a training program that was based on very radical paradigms. Ones that stand in opposition to the dominant mainstream ones.

One way they do that is ask professionals to give away the power to interpret a person’s experience and to let people make sense of their own experience from their own context and perspectives and worldview. Theory, or life experience, can still give them ideas of what to enquire about but the act of interpreting what you find is left with the person. That is where self-determination comes in.

If you go for help to someone who works from one of the dominant approaches. They have been primed to look for what is wrong with you and to interpret that. They will be looking for how the trauma distorted your thinking patterns and getting you to practise thinking differently. They might give you a story that contradicts your thinking patterns, for example that it is not your fault, and it is your job to take that story on board and to change your thinking.

Now instead of that, imagine sitting with someone who is helping you to search amongst your memories for moments of hope and moments of mana. And looking for what you were connected to in those moments that made hope and mana possible for you. Even for the most severely traumatised, those moments are there somewhere in their history. Something kept them alive in the face of unimaginable cruelty. Those are the connections they need to re-discover.

From those moments and those connections, you can together build mana-enhancing stories about them and their world. Stories that can be lived out, and celebrated until they become the dominant ones. Those stories have been hidden, but the power of them is that you don’t have to take them on board, they are already there.

If you give someone a story pre-written, it does not have the same power. If you get it wrong, you have let them know that you don’t understand what they have been talking about. Or you could get it right and the person could grab your story and run with it. But then they will see you as the source of good stories about them. And will come back for more. It is the old saying of give a person a fish, versus giving them the tools to fish, versus, in this case, helping them to remember their experience of already knowing how to fish.

So, a source of healing is re-discovering those better stories about yourself and the world that already exist. And to be able to do that and to heal well, we all need a good dose of self-determination.

But what has trauma got to do with the election?

Now to take a bigger perspective picture, I want to look at another space where self-determination is essential for healing from trauma. That space is the collective trauma from a history of colonisation.

Yes, the impact of colonisation and the ongoing impacts are about trauma. Trauma is what is happening when white supremacist colonisers dispossess you of land, and culture, and lives, while pretending to help you, to civilise you. It is incomprehensible that this would happen to you and leaves you living in a world of unimaginable cruelty.

How can we heal from such things? Over the past few decades there has been much talk of de-colonisation. However, you may have missed it because it is not a dominant story in our society. It is about re-imagining how we would have been living in this country if Te Tiriti O Waitangi had been honoured. And about allowing that collective imagining to influence how we choose to live now.

To do that, we as Māori need to be able to tell our own stories about ourselves and our history. But our mana-enhancing stories are hidden because we have been bringing up our tamariki in a society where other people’s stories about us dominate. For example, stories about our warlike ancestors who were always fighting amongst tribes, and remember the story about the warrior gene? These are stories that everyone in NZ has heard. What they do is re-enforce the impacts of colonisation and the assumption of Māori cultural inferiority that came with it.

And if we were to write stories ourselves about inter-tribal relations, they would be very different. Who has heard the stories about how our ancestors were much better at making peace than war? We have stories of whakapapa relationships between the tribes over generations. And many stories of the travels that our Rangatira ancestors went on around the country to re-enforce those relationships. It’s almost as if it is written in the job description for an up and coming Rangatira to go forth and make good relationships everywhere. Those are mana-enhancing stories that connect us.

So as individuals we need to learn how to find and celebrate and nourish and practice our mana enhancing stories for ourselves. Therein lies healing. As a people, Māori need to be able to do the same.

Back to the election campaign.

When you start to hear stories about Māori campaigning for self-determination, and wanting to govern ourselves under our own systems, remember that it is about who gets to tell our stories and who gets to decide how we should live.

And if you listen carefully you will hear that it is about healing from a history of trauma. And remember that, to achieve healing, we all need a good dose of self-determination. That is what the election campaign has reminded me of.

But this election, is going to be a gnarly ride. So, I say, sit back, strap yourselves in, and if you can’t enjoy the ride, at least, take this as an opportunity to remember what is important to you.

About the author

Cushla has been a clerk, an economist, a counsellor, an advocate, an organic food grower, and always an aunty. She was raised in South Auckland, lived in Australia for 16 years, but always had a connection to her taha Māori from Ngati Whakaue, Te Arawa waka. She now lives in a garden, just out of Rotorua and has begun writing.

This story is a Citizen contribution to the Transitional Democracy series. 
Take Part in the Transition.

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