ReCentering Domestic NonViolence

This brisk, sunny March morning, I return from delivering my son to his adult daycare van. Upon opening The Norwich Times, I delight to read the new Center for Safe Futures "will be taking a huge step forward in how well we can serve the growing number of our neighbors who need help with domestic violence..." After reading the article, I am more dimly enlightened about this significant half-step toward a more integrated and holistic service structure to improve safety and well-being outcomes for victims and survivors of violence, assault, stalking, physical and verbal hate-crime abuse, black-market sale pricing for using powerless and unheard and unseen and uncared for human bodies commodified to provide third party capital profits, and other disturbing forms of predative trauma. Violently polarizing drama threatens trust in neighborhood-felt survival, and our civil, compassionate community thrival, every time we hear, and, god forbid, exhaustively watch depressing, national history-making news brought to us by our uncivil, wounded and wounding retributive criminal justice systems; uncaring, unhealthy, and certainly not holistic empowerment systems for nonviolent reconciliation. My colleagues on the Norwich Youth, Family, and Recreation Advisory Board have become used to my eagerness to celebrate half-steps toward win/win strategic restorative peace while simultaneously sternly reconsidering our missing nonviolent communication step away from retributive win/lose justice systems. World wide webs pitching prey against predator, cultivating my despair about polarizing dissociative drama rooted in divisive demonizing trauma systems that do not empower resilient health and safely resonant domestic wealth. Down near the bottom of the first front-page column I read, "Service providers and community partners will work together to break the [systemic trauma] cycle of violence and abuse." Wow! Now this is an unexpected good news mission statement! On second thought, it does echo messianic scriptured messages about the Christian Prince of Peace's salvific mission, and that, so far, feels like an aging, poor in spirit, and increasingly despairing half-empty step toward downsizing EarthJustice expectations for global nonviolent peace and justice. In my wild decaffeinated morning meditations, this eagerly anticipated aspiration, to break the win/lose bonds of systemic trauma, reminds me of a huge covenant change proposed for discussion at All Souls UU, in New London. "We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression." I wonder how we would practice such powerful "Beloved Community" passion. How could our faith communities help break the vicious cycle of violence, abuse, and emotional neglect fueling neurosystemic trauma? Perhaps Restorative Justice and Peace Reconciliation practices of nonviolent communication could empower transparent and vulnerable dialogue between defendants and predators, so often brought together and stuck together by addictive codependence--which feels safer, and economically healthier than aching loneliness, emptiness, hopelessness, despair of punishment, shame, blame, Othering judgments that we do not merit unconditional warm regard. My own therapeutic feelings of hope, informed by Multicultural Community Mediation, focusses on safer and healthier and emotionally wealthier compassionate relationships. Empowering intention and win/win designed retention I cannot find in this article. It misses a redemptive half-step that could prophetically declare we will not tolerate the "vengeance is mine" heresy that perpetuates future victimization. Excommunication brought to us by judicial and police systems inciting weaponized trauma among those voted least likely to succeed by disassociated peers. Is it reasonable to hope this Center for Safe Futures, and all the best intervention and prevention practices advertised by an expanding Family Justice Center model may be fully baptized in the peace-making waters of Restorative Justice? Will domestically healthy and safe mission statements survive the ribbon cutting to become resiliently saved from past systemic trauma sins of our Straight White Patriarchal fathers? I guess I'm still waiting, as my acidic coffee stomach turns cold with impatient curiosity, for some other brilliantly brighter good news front-page article announcing the multiculturally grand virtues of neurosystemic trauma-informed therapeutic projects to ReCenter Healthy Bodies and Safe Mind Wellness Futures. Compassionate futures that restore virtuous communion circles of therapeutic repair--and not viciously retributive, accountability trauma hierarchies continuing to promise more efficiently enlightened from-above services, still half-stepping toward managing a universally disunitarian pandemic of dissociative despair.