Tag Archives: healing

Are consent and trauma useful enough concepts to help navigate violation and healing? I talk with psychoanalyst and author AVGI SAKETOPOULOU on AEWCH 259!

9 Apr

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Friends,

The world is a generator of mass future trauma. Of course, it always is, but it has rarely been as obvious in my lifetime, and probably yours, as it is now. We anticipate a future of people dealing with the violence done to them, or having done violence to others, or having witnessed violence.

So it is more important than ever to ask: is our view of trauma and healing up to the task of helping so many cope with the fallout of the trauma being created today?

What if we require a whole new understanding of trauma? Not as something healable, even, but as something to work with, think with, move with?

Furthermore, because one of the ways trauma can be generated is through violation, and the framing of that violation is often a frame of a breach of consent. But… is our model of consent useful is relating to trauma and violation, or even in protecting us from it?

I’ve talked about these topics on the show before, but the conversation runs particularly deep on this episode with my guest, psychoanalystAVGI SAKETOPOULOU. Avgi is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and co-author (with Ann Pellegrini) of Gender without Identity, two excellent books that confront therapeutic/psychoanalytic status quo views of desire, queerness, and trans life in both clinical setting and the public conversation at large. Her thinking offers a strong defense of queer and trans self-determination, as well as powerfully nuanced perspectives on sexualities.

I’m so happy to share this episode, and all its challenging directions, with you.

MORE ON AVGI

Here’s Avgi’s website, which has a comprehensive list of her publications and links to other interviews, including her talk with one of my very favorite writers, Adam Phillips. I also recommend her challenging books, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and, with co-author Ann Pellegrini, Gender without Identity.

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7 Nov

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Friends,

In times of obvious schisms between human beings and their structures there can be a stirring-up of opportunities that only the frenetic and urgent intensities schism times can reveal. In these times, we can see that there have always been many pathways available to us, that we were stuck, that we can be there for each other and dissolve obstruction.

A world that is culturally, politically, and economically invested in materialism, is going to have a very difficult time looking into the foundations of materialism and its missionary forces of consumerism and scientism. People who do talk about materialism (especially science and medicine) in any sort of critical way can end up reflexively throw away the value that materialism, including materialistic science gives us. Additionally, this throwing-away can show up in immoral ways, like condemning people for using Western medicine, trying to stay healthy using mainstream advice on nutrition, or tending to their community’s needs when it comes to public health.

How do we interrogate the series of knots and ties that bind our ideas of reality together, while at the same time offering understanding to each other (and ourselves!), acknowledging the fact that we are all tangled up in them? And what happens when we start to undo the knots?

Eventually, will we even know the world we’re living in? Will it appear to us even remotely like the one we live in now?

I asked one of my most popular guests back onto the show to discuss all of this, ARE THORESEN.

Are is a writer, teacher, anthroposophist, and accupuncturist. His two most recent books in English are most relevant here, because they both reference the Nordic tradition that includes Vidar and the actual changes in the spiritual world. They are Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation: Vidar and Baldur, the Three Elemental Realms and the Inner and Outer Etheric Worlds and Encounters with Vidar: Communications from the Outer Etheric Realm: From Clairvoyance to Clairaudience. Each draws on Norse mythology and finds where it meets with the Christian mysteries of today.

Are’s previous appearances on the show – AEWCH 116 and AEWCH 205 – delved into demonology, the Norse gods, the possibility of white magick, healing without translocating a disease (that is, without simply dislocating the disease so that it moves to a different site), and more. This episode is no exception to the rule of range and depth and, quite frankly, the strangeness to our normal sensibilities that talks with Are bring. I don’t highlight the strangeness in any sort of sensationalistic way, but rather to show how different things can get when you start genuinely considering the world from a different lens.

Time, space, physics, science, animal communication… nothing is off the table in this episode.

I hope it enlivens you!

MORE ON ARE
Here’s another interview with Are, in which he goes into the foundational ideas a bit more. And Are’s spiritual autobiography is in the book Transforming Demons: The True Story of How a Seeker Resolves His Karma: From Ancient Atlantis to the Present-Day.

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