A warning: this article mentions suicide and mental trauma.
I am a psychologist with a 100% Indigenous client base. I can tell you with 25 years of authority and expertise that the narrative that colonialism brought only “positive changes” for Aboriginal people isn’t misguided, it is dangerous.
I work in the prevention of Indigenous suicide and violence, counselling for trauma and mental health treatment, and have witnessed my clients regress in their therapy from this dangerous misconception. Each one is a human being, all of whom have a consistent background of living with the legacy of colonialism’s forced removals of Aboriginal children from their families.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comments that there aren’t lasting negative impacts of British colonisation reveal a lack of comprehension regarding race-mediated trauma, the ongoing effects of colonialism, the conditions that enabled it and which continue and which have been linked not by anecdote but by science.
It also tells me that sadly, the default position is still to deny the trauma of Aboriginal people rather than validate or acknowledge it, as if doing so will result in it being contagious or result in some sort of “victim mentality vortex” that Aboriginal people are unable to extract ourselves from when the clear evidence is that trauma denial compounds it rather than prevents it. It creates further stigma for those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — that they are simply not tough enough to “snap out of it”, for example.
When Aboriginal leadership is promoting this idea, it becomes more widely endorsed because it’s coming from “lived experience”. Lived experience is extremely helpful to understand and develop insight, but not when it discounts the trauma of survivors.
There is also the erroneous idea that trauma is visible, which creates more stigma to those with trauma. Most people with PTSD look “functional” day to day but that doesn’t mean they and their families are not suffering. Those with PTSD can internalise and hide their symptoms well. This includes flashbacks, depression, substance abuse, impulse control, anger and violence.
So if we are truly serious about prevention — given the link between PTSD and increased risk for contact with the justice system and child protection services as well as the link with suicides — trauma denial ensures we fail to address the root cause.
Survivors deemed ‘less worthy’
Living with trauma symptoms takes extraordinary strength.
The more extreme danger is that Aboriginal trauma survivors are deemed less worthy of empathy, that if colonialism was not harmful and its continuing effects do not explain the over-representation of Aboriginal people in poor outcomes, then the only thing left to explain it is that there are “deficits in the culture”. Assimilation then becomes the promoted “solution” — and PTSD is seen as something Aboriginal people “create” in our minds.
If we deny Indigenous trauma, then we must deny PTSD in those exposed to similar race-based trauma. We have certainly seen too many examples of people denying the Holocaust or the Stolen Generations as well as the massacres perpetuated on Native Americans.
Trauma denial compounds trauma. When people have PTSD, they do not always link behaviours (anger, flashbacks, depression, substance abuse) to trauma. Recognition and validation of trauma provides victims with the necessary insights to heal. It empowers and validates what victims have instinctually always known.
Without this, survivors can remain caught in a cycle of biologically hard-wired trauma behaviours known as “repetition compulsion” — the compulsion to repeat the patterns of their trauma. It is not unusual, for example, for victims of violence to not realise they are victims for years after leaving violent relationships — it’s a very common trauma dynamic.
In 25 years as a psychologist I have never know trauma validation to create more trauma, but trauma denial does. It ensures these biological hard-wired trauma responses are normalised and passed into future generations through caregiver bonds and intimate relationships.
False equivalency
Price set off a flood of false equivalencies with people comparing their “lack of self-reported trauma” from having grandparents who came back from war and Nyunggai Warren Mundine arguing Holocaust survivors aren’t in a “foetal position”.
While there is a false equivalency between war and racial persecution as ongoing inescapable trauma variables, ironically the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide’s report was released the day before Price’s speech, showing inconveniently, and consistent with decades of research, that war veterans aren’t “doing fine”.
We can add the mountain of research showing generational trauma of Holocaust survivors and another mountain similarly showing colonised groups including Aboriginal people consistently have the poorest health, mental health, employment and educational outcomes.
Indigenous leadership rightly universally condemned these comments, but they also set off a conga line of media celebrating Price’s falsities as “brave”.
One hundred per cent of my Aboriginal caseload has multiple layers of trauma. They all have a common background: their families were torn apart due to colonialist assimilation policies, racial exclusion and persecution. Many will never know their history because the removal was denied (“done for their own good”), and many have taken decades to understand the trauma they experienced was not something they should be “grateful for”.
The conditions that enabled colonialism do not simply “disappear” by denying they continue to exist — racism-based trauma, race-based traumatic stress, and racist incident–based trauma produce similar clinical symptoms to that of PTSD.
To now have Indigenous leadership argue for a return to the policies that enabled it is too dangerous not to challenge because trauma, for Aboriginal people, has always been inherently political. And the idea that your trauma will repeat itself is a survivor’s worst nightmare.
What is PTSD?
There’s a difference between trauma exposure and PTSD as a diagnosis. Complex PTSD involves childhood trauma and multiple trauma exposures.
Collective trauma occurs when race-based persecution exists as unique trauma variables for the individual and, based on the data, whole disproportionally affected communities. The trauma of stolen children, forced relocation, stolen wages, educational exclusion resulting from colonisation have long-term effects, making PTSD a more prevalent diagnosis for Aboriginal people because they exist as additional, race-mediated trauma variables that increase the likelihood.
Not all trauma is equal. And not everyone exposed to traumatic events will have PTSD. There are preconditions that increase the odds and which has been understood in science for some time. Much of this is the nature of the trauma. For example, I have clients who have had children murdered through vigilante attacks. Violent death increases the odds of PTSD. When racism is a factor in your trauma it increases again. The day-to-day existence can activate the same flight/fight responses of PTSD in which the world just feels existentially unsafe.
So denying stolen children, massacres and identity destruction via assimilation, means these additional variables are not incorporated within standard trauma therapies.
While there are factors unique to Indigenous trauma that need to be the focus of trauma-based therapies, we instead have a racist narrative of Aboriginality being somehow causative. This simply stereotypes and demonises and offers zero value to therapists from the perspective of altering behaviours. Violence, for example is not a black person issue. It is a human behaviour issue.
Research consistently shows that racism reduces access to critical mental health services for Aboriginal people and continues to feed escalating suicides. The recent Fogliani inquest into the 13 deaths of Aboriginal young people — 12 by suicide — in the Kimberley noted that not one of the young people had had a mental health assessment.
Trauma therapists have little to no training in culturally informed trauma and feel overwhelmed by the extent of trauma in the average Aboriginal client. Governments then fail to fund unique trauma-based programs into our highest-risk communities — and the generational cycle continues.
Intergenerational trauma occurs when trauma event/s are passed down through generations via our genes, biology and environments that exist as threatening (for example: racism as trauma).
Forced child removal was a significantly traumatic aspect of colonisation. Science informs us it is almost impossible to recover from forced removal from primary attachments. The length of time trauma goes on, the greater the likelihood of PTSD. In circumstances in which you have no control, no power over your child being removed, it severely affects secure attachment to your child. It arms the nervous system to be on constant alert. If I truly attach to a child I can realistically lose, that would be intolerable. The threat of imminent and unpredictable child removal meant trauma responses had to be constantly enabled. These stress responses are all biologically based.
Forced removals were denied
The final piece of the trauma puzzle is forced removals were denied and minimised by successive governments until the 2007 apology. This denial virtually guaranteed its intergenerational transmission through lack of victim insight into the fact that their behaviours were linked to forced removals.
Its sobering that the Kimberley has 100% of children in out-of-home care who are Indigenous and for decades has also had the highest rates of suicide in Australia. The NT has 92% and suicides there are also among the world’s highest. This tells us something critical: remove a child from a family and those families never recover and those children never recover.
This is where collective trauma is badly understood: remember, trauma feeds trauma.
Collective trauma then explains why child removals, suicides, violence and incarceration disproportionately affect communities with the highest proportion of Aboriginal people, which seems counter-intuitive — that you are in “the majority” but you are more, rather than less, oppressed. South Africa had apartheid, yet more than 80% of the population is Black. The NT had the Intervention, yet 26.3% are Aboriginal.
It is remote regions which have the most historical and current oppression through government-enacted legislation which restricts human rights such as cashless welfare cards and alcohol restrictions. Successive governments then continue to restrict human rights rather than fund complex trauma-based programs. The NT intervention made helplessness a dominant force and families felt powerless to stop it. There was a 160% increase in suicides of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in the NT between 2006 and 2010 after the intervention.
This disproportionate burden is further understood by the fawn trauma response, which is “other” rather than self-directed — appeasing your abuser, for example. Looking complicit in your own abuse because of fear of abuse escalating. This occurs when there is a victim-perpetrator power differential. It then occurs at a collective level when whole communities experience greater levels of race-based trauma than others.
Certainly, the neuroscientific phenomena known as “other race effect” shows the brain reacts to people of colour as exponentially more threatening, and the racial empathy gap shows that the brain appraises the pain of Black people as less than the pain of white people.
It is harder to relate to the circumstances of Aboriginal people when race is not a factor for you or your family. So demonising whole communities such as Alice Springs becomes too comfortable and conversations become so extreme about appropriate solutions (i.e. remove more children rather than prevent removal). Conversations are then solely around further human rights restrictions of entire communities and towns rather than individual accountability, and this means further race-based damage rather than prevention.
We certainly do not see similar public responses of demonising entire towns when there are cases of significant paedophile rings perpetrated by white offenders in predominantly highly populated white regions.
So, Aboriginal people are forced as a collective to march in the streets just to have their trauma validated, equally resulting in the initial trauma being magnified exponentially. It’s a sad time when this type of dehumanising/less worthy trauma survivors’ political narrative is being seen as innovative and which favours a repeat of the past.
I wonder how we will reflect on this time and how the world is viewing Australia. I had to think long and hard about challenging the words of Price — as Aboriginal people we are raised to never speak against another Aboriginal person.
However, we have fought too hard for equality to not be beyond critical challenge. True leadership should champion it if it is truly “brave”.
