Poverty isn’t invisible

*Where did August go? Into wildfire smoke and the heat of exhausted ecosystems.* “What do you notice?” “A lot of grief. And there’s something like . . . an internal flinch. Not a physical flinch, almost a psychological one.” The clinician raised his eyebrows and wrote something down but said nothing. “Okay. Ready?” *No*. “Yes.” I picked up the little plastic paddles again. This exchange, from a recent therapeutic session, is indicative of my experience of EMDR: a murky, weird journey into my own mind and memories during which I’m encouraged not to force anything or narrate, but simply observe what’s going on, note it, and keep going. EMDR, which stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy,” is a therapeutic treatment that relies on bilateral stimulation and is used primarily to treat trauma. When I first started EMDR, the clinician tipped two fingers back and forth while I followed their movement and let my mind wander where it willed, prompted first by whatever painful memory we’d chosen from the list I’d brought in. Now we do it with small handheld paddles that alternately pulse or vibrate; even with my eyes closed I notice they’re still following the movement back and forth, like a metronome. EMDR was discovered accidentally by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987, who was walking in a park when she noticed the effect her own eye movement had on difficult memories. She developed it to treat PTSD in war veterans, and later trained clinicians treating people who’d survived horrific traumas like genocide or mass rape. It’s been shown to be extremely effective for PTSD but, as Stephanie Foo related in her memoir *What My Bones Know*, it wasn’t intended for the chronic, long-term trauma that’s known as complex trauma or C-PTSD, the kind that can develop from an abusive childhood or relationship. EMDR often doesn’t work in those cases. It didn’t for her, nor for many other people I know with childhood experiences similar to mine. For some reason, it has for me. For the past two years I’ve been doing it almost weekly, with months off now and then because, while EMDR is a surprisingly effective tool for trauma, it’s also exhausting. Many sessions feel almost brutal, a surreal word to use because neither the person being treated nor the clinician is really *doing* anything. I sit there letting my mind wander—“stop trying to control where it goes,” the clinician has had to constantly remind me—through memories, that day’s stresses, visualizations that have become familiar places in my years of half-assed meditation, dreams both recent and old, worries about my kids, and, reliably, “What am I doing? Is this working? Am I ever going to get ‘better?’ Is the therapist bored?” That last one comes up a lot. A couple months ago I asked if we could try EMDR for what I described as financial fear: all the outsized worries of poverty, of finding myself even more poor than I had been growing up, of the invisibility and dehumanization that accompany poverty. Specifically of living on the streets with my teeth falling out because for some reason that’s what I’m most consistently worried about. My teeth. Maybe that will happen; maybe it won’t. I’d just like to stop being so overrun by fear of it that I find it hard to get my work done, perhaps turning poverty into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The EMDR process aims to take strong emotions like fear and underlying beliefs like “I am unsafe” or “I am unworthy” (there’s a whole list that I keep in the back of my planner, and I can’t say I enjoy tracking down what my frightened inner two- or twelve-year-old is feeling that day) and reframing them into positive cognitions. Nobody knows quite why it’s so effective for PTSD but dozens of clinical trials have shown that it is. All my previous sessions had been focused on single events, specific scenes of violence or abandonment or other cruelty and the associated emotions. My reactions to those sessions are intense. After my very first one I had a splitting headache for two days, and on the third I hid in the cupboard under the stairs to sob for two solid hours. I f\*\*\*\*\*g hate EMDR. It’s probably saved me from spending the rest of my life lost in a dark labyrinth of disconnected emotions and avoided memories, but it’s painful as hell and it’s hard to see when or how you’ll ever be free of all the grief, fear, and other emotions it brings up. Like you might just be stuck wandering those dark paths forever. It’s worked for me but I hesitate to recommend it to anyone. It’s painful in almost all the ways humans can experience pain. At one point I wondered if facing one’s shadow simply isn’t something most people could or even should handle. The sessions on financial fear have been different from the others. Less intense for one thing. I’ve done several now, and they all seem to lead nowhere except toward an increasingly large, dark mass in the center of my being, a mass that would rather stay hidden. Interestingly, I had a brief conversation just this week with a friend going through a similar process, and she also described coming across some enormous mass. I keep wandering in mental circles, or spirals, or maybe just turning around and around in one spot, opening doors to just about every difficult issue I have ever carried. When I walk away from these sessions, desperate for sleep but needing to get home to make dinner, it’s almost always with the same question: how do variations on these same fears show up in humanity’s worst habits and most destructive societal structures? Which aspects of my own fears are universal? The fear of poverty is inherent in but not exclusive to capitalism—the Soviet Union under communism had poverty. Despite rhetoric about fair and equal distribution, Party leaders had access to privileges and resources not available to anyone else, most of whom, like my father and his family, stood in line for hours for bread or the occasional sausage or fruit. Without wealth inequality and the theft of shared resources for the profit of a few, there would be no poverty, or at least not poverty as we currently conceive of it. No world where a medical emergency or loss of a home or job could mean bankruptcy. Like all words, “poverty” carries its own historical weight. It is a measure of worth in a society designed to be unequal. Scarcity is another story. Fear of starving or freezing to death is primal. I don’t think you could go back far enough in time anywhere on this planet and find people who didn’t face scarcity at one point or another. A winter harsher and longer than usual, a summer scant in berries, a season when the animals were hard to find. In lands like Russia, where my father and stepmother are from, people lived on berries and mushrooms and sometimes meat, the country’s soil being what historians have called agriculturally marginal. Ukraine’s rich, fertile “black earth” soil and access to the Black Sea are two of the reasons Russia’s leaders have persistently tried to take over and control the country. My fears of poverty are informed by a hungry childhood. It’s a fear that threads through my days even though, for now, I have a home and work I love and can feed my kids. It threads just as much through the days of a billionaire who cannot let go of his wealth because anything less might be *not enough*. Poking at those fears during EMDR sessions have started to convince me that there’s something ancient in them, too, something, yes, universal. When the commons of England were stolen and privatized, and the same damage later inflicted on Scotland and Ireland, it threw people into deeper poverty by taking their homes and means of survival while at the same time making their homelessness and destitution illegal. Many of those same people, both the thieves and the people they stole the commons from, went on to enact the same theft on a broader and more violent scale in North America. Colonial powers wrecked systems where almost everyone had enough, or at least that was the goal; and ever since, those powers have tried to persuade the world that a few people owning or controlling all the land, water, knowledge, and power is what ensures maximum freedom and security for everyone. How differently would my financial fears, or yours, feel if you knew you would not starve, or be unhoused, or slide into unmanageable debt while those who own the debt live in luxury. Avoiding scarcity is never guaranteed. But neither is the security supposedly granted by wealth and ownership. As I wrote recently, the growth of data centers and the damage they inflict are a clear reminder that ownership and wealth are only a measure of power, not of security. If someone with more power wants your home or your electricity or your water, they’ll find a way to take it, no matter what deeds of ownership you hold. But if people know the commons are shared, if they’re managed at the levels of community, region, and planet, then the prospect of scarcity—not poverty—is a shared one. There’s a big difference between the buffalo herd not showing up in its usual place one season and your people needing to manage the winter’s food needs differently that year, and an invading power deciding to massacre all the buffalo so that you and your community don’t have food. There’s an essay I wrote here a couple of years ago, about getting stranded at a cabin with my younger kid and dwindling food supplies, whose central question I think about constantly: what would it take to have faith that the universe or Creation or Mother Earth or whatever gods you do or do not believe in will take care of you? What would it take to release the need to hustle and earn and own and work ourselves *so hard* simply to survive, and to know instead that there are other ways to provide for ourselves and one another? What if our access to resources matched nature’s abundance? What if our work could be fulfilling while leaving time for the beauties and pleasures of living instead of that work being a grind and a threat? The amount of fear underlying financial worries is immense and very real. Money controls our access to food, health care, transportation, and housing, but often also joy, pleasure, fun, warmth, connection, knowledge, and curiosity. It’s easy to scoff at that last list of experiences, but I remember the times in college when I was working five outside jobs at a time to make ends meet and how much more difficult it was not just to learn in my classes, but to care about learning. I was often too tired and too stressed to muster the motivation. There’s this guy on YouTube, Joe Hudson, whose coaching videos I’ve watched off and on, usually the ones about money. (This is not a recommendation; it’s just something I clicked on out of curiosity.) It’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen, watching people he’s working with dig into their own financial fears to find that what they’re scared of is not lack of money as much as it is being invisible, unloved, and worthless. That’s what poverty is: a millennia-old story humanity has created, to mark wealth as a measure of worth. In his extensive 5,000-year history of wealth accumulation, exploitation, and freedom titled *The Sociology of Freedom*, the Kurdish freedom fighter Abdullah Öcalan wrote that, “In the central civilization systems, the subject always stems from capital and power. It represents consciousness, discourse, and free will. . . . The objects are the barbarians, the peoples, and the women excluded from power. They are only thought of—as is the case with nature—when they serve the subject as a resource.” That is, those with capital and power are considered people, human in the way that everyone else isn’t. Everyone else, human and more-than-human, is an object, a resource. The philosopher Aristotle, who lived in Greece in the 4th century BCE, argued vehemently that some people were simply “natural slaves.” A defender of the ideas of private property and ownership (though not of greed and hoarding), he had no trouble counting humans not as people but as part of that property. In a way, the fear of scarcity that comes with being living beings on a living planet has been turned into a weapon. Or a threat, one inherent in the word “poverty:” fall behind, and you become an object. Worthless except in your economic value to someone else. Invisible. I didn’t expect the EMDR sessions to lead me down these paths, but then I don’t expect them to lead me down any particular paths. If I did, they probably wouldn’t work. And I imagine that every person who journeys into that darkness finds themselves on their own paths stumbling over their own stories. It’s when our ways intersect that I begin to wonder if there’s a lost wholeness we’re all yearning for whether we know it or not, a true kinship most of humanity once had with the rest of life and the knowledge, the faith perhaps, that when we care for or neglect our commons together, and benefit or suffer together from that care or despite it, everything will be alright. Even, somehow, when it’s not. Maybe the journey into this shadow is something we’re meant to take collectively. Maybe it’s meant to remain as private as I’ve kept these experiences most of my life. Or maybe it’s just meant to remind us that nobody, no matter what their circumstances, is invisible. To make each of us see our own worth. I’ll let you know if I ever get there. This was a weird one, but that’ll happen sometimes. 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