In part I, I described how exposure to violence and trauma are at the root of hunger. Trauma responses to rape, racism, abuse, and neglect affect one’s biology through the organs and bloodstream, one’s social functioning, behaviors, and cognitive capabilities. Trauma responses are wide-ranging and include heightened awareness, dissociation, shutting down emotions, and harboring feelings of deep shame, anxiety, and depression. These can all affect one’s ability to earn money, function well on the job, and have positive and lasting relationships. I also explained healing-centered approaches that consider ways to prevent the reenactment or triggering of trauma responses as well as create group-oriented experiences that support positive social, emotional, and financial functioning. These processes can help to heal deep-seated sadness, lack of self-worth, and isolation, and simultaneously reduce food insecurity. I noted, too, that this internalized response to trauma is a fractal of societal, political, and economic violence in everyday life in the United States.
In this segment, I demonstrate how most people in the United States are attempting to function in what many would call a trauma-organized society, meaning a society that is reenacting over and again our traumatic experiences that haunt us. The unresolved trauma creates disordered attachments, social isolation, separation from each other, and separation from our own emotions and bodies. Trauma in someone’s family is a reflection of our societal, collective trauma.1
This kind of collective trauma is easy to understand if one traces the ways in which it is transferred. In trauma theory, one of the concepts that helps to explain this is parallel process. Parallel process is how two or more systems—consisting of groups or organizations—have significant relationships with one another, and tend to develop similar affects, cognition, and behaviors rooted in trauma. So the systems that are meant to support people with minimal income start to reflect the same processes as the original violences that created poverty. Organizations, if recognized as living entities comprised of many people, become trauma-organized systems. That is, they are systems organized around reenacting violence.2 Organizations are also sites of multiple unfair inequities and reproduce them in ways that are especially harmful to women of color.3 Many social services organizations and government agencies are part of systems that seek to regulate, control, and separate people from each other. Additionally, it seems as if the very energy that keeps the systems going is the pleasure that workers, their bosses, and agency administrators experience as a result of being on top and keeping others down.
What’s ahead are a few examples. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how public assistance programs separate people from each other and have the effect of severing the most profound ties in the family, especially those between parent and child. The parent-child bond during early childhood is a fundamentally important time of development and growth, and any interruptions or severing of that attachment is a trauma.4 Through such severing, the government and corporations can ease in and exploit people, keep families down through low wages, imprisonment or hunger, and blunt efforts to improve programs. Chapter 6 takes you into people’s personal experiences to show how TANF is one of the worst offenders of the separation technique, and utilizes racist and sexist practices to achieve it. Chapter 7 takes on the sacred cow of SNAP. I say sacred cow because many people view SNAP as the number one way to address hunger in the country. But just because it’s the largest and most effective does not mean it will end hunger. In fact, SNAP is used as a tool by food corporations and the American Beverage Association to profit off of people in poverty, and the US government makes this possible. Finally, I take on the beloved charity practices that so many of us engage in thinking we are doing our part to address hunger. Beware, the path that the emergency food system leads us down is the wrong way. It leads us toward a cute candy house. Yes, it’s sweet on the outside, but inside is a murky energy meant to fool everyone into believing we are helping, when all we are doing is supporting the very processes that make people hungry in the first place.
What’s ahead may shatter your ideas of the helping social systems. It may cause you to question everything. This is a healthy practice; it is a good time to adopt a beginner’s mind.
1. Thomas Hübl and Julie Jordan Avritt, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2020).
2. Sandra L. Bloom and Brian J. Farragher, Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3. Joan Acker, “Inequality Regimes: Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations,” Gender and Society 20, no. 4 (August 2006): 441–464, https://
4. Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (New York: Avery, 2022).