The accusation is fired again and again at women—"you’re weaponizing your trauma,” and for months I’ve been mulling over how this verbal slight-of-hand operates, and why it’s risen to such screamingly frequent usage. Merriam-Webster tells us that the meaning of “weaponize” is to “adapt for use as a weapon of war,” and from this definition, the whirring patriarchal inversions begin to bloom in my head like mushroom clouds. Of course, on some level, this understanding seems all too obvious. We live in a culture which glorifies, wallows, and revels in our addiction to conflict, to war.
The Other is either On My Side or an opponent, a foe. More often than not we don’t have discussions but arguments. Solid evidence must be provided, rhetorical rules about acceptable ‘engagement’ applied, the victor of each skirmish deemed right and the loser wrong. But collectively we seem to have forgotten that this framing is but one way of experiencing the world. So the saying goes, when one is a hammer, everything begins to look like nails.
Discussion of our trauma is not an act of war. It can certainly be used this way—no doubt—but even raising the concern that some might utilize sharing of trauma to advance their occult stratagems is to continue to be committed to the framing that everything is either hierarchical clambering for personal gain or an act of war. And we will never be able to escape our cultural escalation of domination and oppression if we do not shift our vantage point towards a different dynamic.
As Steve Weber writes,
“Some may view this as just a small debate over a word [weaponization], and just the normal, hypocritical political rhetoric and corporate conversations that fill op-ed pages with outrage but little impact. That view is wrong. The reality is, hypocrisy adds up over time and has a corrosive effect on long term relationships, particularly when trust is central to the equation.” 1
How do we learn to trust each other again? How do we begin to operate and co-operate more often out of good faith, and acknowledge of our inter-dependency? Out of an understanding that storytelling is at its heart an attempt to forge connections with one another? In the spirit of these questions, I’d like to tell you a story, a different sort of story.
Does not the Great Mother teach us of death and decay? Of what happens to a tree when one of its limbs is torn off in a heavy storm or severed by a chainsaw? Of the rich rot of the compost heap, the churning tunnels of the worms, the turning of what once was green and humming with life into curling leaves, the pungent heap, the moldering darkness? What is soil after all but a thousand years of life turning to death turning to life turning to death?
Life and death are constantly reaching for one another in the bed of the world, interdependent and miraculous under the gleaming power of the one God who gives himself away, the Sun. The tree that is hacked, the stem that snaps and weeps, will eventually scab over—weep perhaps for years—but the edges will without fail come together. Disease might get in, insects, or rot borne on water; all manner of troubles arise when a wound is created. Sometimes, the tree will die. Sometimes it does not.
If we were to compose human systems as though they were grown organically from the earth’s own systems, we might recycle everything. The shattered glass swept up and melted down for something new to be blown. The splintered steel structures salvaged, and perhaps fashioned into protean wings, into instruments for dreaming, into chests for all that once was cherished but lost to be reborn again inside. A blackened eye could become a shrewder gaze. A broken collar bone a repaired bridge for the arms to hold still more close. A bombed-out metallic desecration heaped into the forge might emerge as shining alloy—one that’s quick to take an edge, and which repeated hammering can only further harden.
What was ravaged renovated into a new heart, one with a new rhythm. Almost unrecognizable at first, a pulse that harmonizes the peace of a cricket-filled night, a raging hurricane’s wind, and the crinkle of two million oak leaves slowly compacting into a damp carpet of mulch, feeding back to the trees as much as they were fed in light and sugar when the sun was blazing overhead.
No one could ever say that a tree was weaponizing its trauma as it stands whirring in the windy forest. It merely heals its trauma. And to anyone with the will to see and hear the tree’s story written in bark and the forever changed fluttering and creaking—a soundscape which no longer includes the voices of the leaves attached to the fallen branch, the heartwood no longer holding its weight in quite the same way—the tree can speak in the voice it lost. But only when we listen for what’s been altered.
Just like La Diosa, the Great Mother, the living force of this planet, we must be prepared to use everything. Even our wounds. For what is a wound but blood reaching for itself? What is a pulped heart but a sodden vessel where that which requires fire to be born might safely grow? Some trees only sprout after being drenched with heavy rain and kissed with fire. It stands to reason that there are also realms of reality which can only come into being this way. Women know this in their bones.
Many of our own grandmothers grandmothers grandmothers were taunted and tortured, split open by priestly gang rapes, burned and burned and burned—along with the sacred bodies of trees—until all their bones collapsed into ash. But the legacy they’ve passed down to us—the women of today—what we have inherited is knowing what fire will do to a body—as well as what it will do to a heart.
The accusation is fired again and again at women—"you’re weaponizing your trauma!” And I can’t help but laugh. I have no war in me. The sisters have never, ever wanted war. The daughters of this planet want more than anything to learn, to sing, to spin, to dance, to drum down from the sky all that light, and blossom into a liberated world of hope in worship of what actually is.
After all, the ribcage is both home for the heart today, and home for the worms and the sprouting acorn tomorrow, and one day it will be no more than calcium and phosphorus, sluicing through stones. The ribcage is always the stars—from before they were ever born right through till after they gutter out into the darkness. What pulses inside the ribcage—spirit, love, energy, call it what you will—this steady drum beat of will and power and gaze and hope and flow and movement. What do you think evolution is the theory of? It was always the theory of life.
Trauma… now that is not strictly about life but about pain. Pain inflicted. Purposely. Pain from which no outlet could be found. Where the woman had to roll her mindspark up into a tiny ball and bury it deep in the earth in the recess of a cavern at the very end of a dark desert. Don’t forget, trauma is not war. It is evidence of resisting, and resistance is never war. Resistance is survival. Resistance is continuing to breathe, for the heart to beat, for the blood to rush into each and every capillary carrying hemoglobin and oxygenating every cell. Until. Until the day the woman can walk again into the desert in search of her vital spark.
If she emerges, intact, having laboriously dug until her fingers tore and bled, wandered alone and grief-stricken in the dim corridors of her cave of wonderous horror, turned her own skin right side out again, pressed her pounding heart against the ancient spirals left on the walls by her ancestors. Yes, even relearned how to speak her own language so that her words no longer echo perilously from the spooky cavern walls. Yes, even pulled the edges of her wounds together with her own blood, darning the very fabric of her world with the force of her body’s will towards creative repair…
If she emerges, she will not be a warrior. She will be a radical. She will be someone who reached so deep down with her taproot into the darkness, spread relentlessly into compacted soil for what no one deemed to have value, feeding and drawing and pulling her mindspark back up into herself. She will be doyenne. She will be the First Woman. She will be matrix and creatrix at once.
If you see her as a weapon—see her story as a weapon—then the problem is not with her, but with your own eyes. She has begun to see life and resplendence and unfolding and refolding and nourishment instead of only war and wants to share her story of emerging from the cave so that others on that path might have some small light to see by.
If you see all of that as merely a weapon, your own mindspark may still buried deep in the earth in your own remote cavern. And to fully understand, you must first go find it.
Weber, Steve, https://breakwaterstrategy.com/words-matter-how-use-of-weaponization-can-damage-interdependent-relationships-and-strategic-decision-making/