Reflections On Working With the Trauma of These Times and Beyond

Photo by Molly

 Reflections On Working With the 

Trauma of These Times and Beyond

It is not easy to be human. There are so many obstacles that we encounter in our lifetimes to remaining grounded, to staying heart-centered, to experiencing the connection and support and resilience that we need to remain increasingly embodied in our sacred wholeness. 

It is a truly courageous and difficult journey to cultivate and sustain a level of consciousness which empowers us to recognize, heal, and transform our illusions, indoctrination, and ignorance. Because, without question, it is my belief that we are all impacted by what the author, poet, and activist bell hooks referred to as imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 

At the heart of so many of our illusions is dehumanization, greed, hatred, and delusion. The rugged individualism worshiped and embedded in our culture pushes many of us to exile our capacities for vulnerability, intimacy, authenticity, empathy, compassion, and love. And anything which leads us to diminish, deny, depress our authentic selves is a trauma to our individual and collective well-being.

It is also true that we are born upon a land where countless atrocities have occurred over time which have never been collectively brought out into the open and healed. These generations of ancestral and collective legacy burdens — which are woven through hundreds of years and more of unattended trauma — also are part of the energy of the Earth that we walk and absorb. Consequently, it isn't only the trauma that we are living with in the present which is causing so much devastating harm. This present day trauma is also intimately linked to our unhealed histories of the past which continue to haunt us and be blindly passed on generation after generation.

Added onto all of this are the unconscious choices that so many of us were faced with as tiny vulnerable children. If we were born to parents who have carried their own unaddressed ancestral and collective trauma, the result would have been that they were inevitably limited and impaired in their capacity to fully see us and to meet our deeper needs. If our anger as toddlers, for example, was met with more anger, with punishment rather than age appropriate expectations and guidance, with emotional withdrawal rather than grounded, wise, and loving compassion, the result inevitably would have been ruptures to trust and attachment. And when we don't experience compassionate mirroring, understanding, and responding to our deeper emotional, mental, and spiritual needs with any degree of consistency we are left feeling unsafe, unacceptable, shamed, and flawed.

When faced with having to choose between attachment and authenticity, as tiny children we will always choose to do whatever we have to do to maintain attachment with our caregivers because our very survival depends upon it. Too often this means suppressing, repressing, depressing the fullness of who we truly are. Again, these ruptures to attachment lead us to exile our vulnerability, authenticity, and capacities for empathy and compassion. 

There is a huge price that we carry into our adult lives when what we learned as children was to exile out of our conscious awareness different parts of ourselves and the deep knowing and lived experience of who we most truly are. Image management then takes over and often we don't even recognize how disassociated we are from ourselves and the compromising betrayals to our own true needs that we are living by. This has certainly been my experience and those of countless others who I've known personally and professionally.

Gabor Maté clearly, wisely, and compassionately articulates in this video the experiences in early childhood which can compel us to choose between attachment and authenticity. And he illuminates that it is never too late to heal the obstacles to our wholeness and live increasingly out of our authentic selves. We have this choice.

Looking through the lens of individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma, is it any wonder that there is so much depression, anxiety, addiction, dehumanization, and other forms of violence towards oneself and others in our society and beyond? I feel so much compassion for myself and all others as I've come to see that there is so much inherited pain and trauma that we humans carry within us, and so often without our conscious awareness. This was, again, very true for me. 

And hurt people hurt people. 

There is no blame or shame in saying this. I'm simply illuminating the inevitable truth that our unattended pain that lives on within us has to go somewhere. We can both internalize it through harsh self-judgments and shame and we can project it outward through a lack of awareness and sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others. To the degree that we are numb and limited in our conscious capacity to hold ourselves with empathy, compassion, and love is the degree that we will be empathically impaired in our relationships with all others. This illuminates the roots of how it is that dehumanization is so prevalent in our nation and beyond.

It is also true that human beings who are healing and unburdening these legacy burdens create ripples which expand out into our collective environments — something which brings healing and hope for us all.

It is precisely because of my own struggles — struggles to awaken in a culture and world which often conspires to keep us ignorant and asleep, repressed and depressed, separated and polarized, distracted and disinformed, and marinating in forces of deep harm — that inspire me to write. Again and again I am moved to speak to how we can work with the individual, ancestral, and cultural legacy burdens that we have inherited and are unknowingly carrying within ourselves. There is so much that I have learned the hard way. But I have been learning. 

This is also certainly a lifelong journey, this peeling back layer after layer of our illusions. It's amazing as I look back and now clearly see the density of the fog I'd been living in and didn't even know it. And I am so very grateful to see — and for the sacred light within myself and which I now recognize within us all.

Sometimes our sacred inner radiance is diminished or blocked out, this light within ourselves and within this beautiful hurting world that we share. But it is there none the less. Always.

Photo by Molly

There is also so much to be grateful for and inspired by. In the midst of the ongoing trauma that we are living through at this time, and in times past, there are increasing numbers of truth-tellers, wisdom-keepers, courageous visionaries, activists and authors, poets and artists, spiritual and political leaders, and beloved teachers and healers who are stepping forward illuminating doorways and pathways through and out of the darkness.

Today I see so clearly how we humans are born into this world whole and beautiful and precious. There is this sacredness that is the core of who we all are that Mark Nepo wisely describes in this way — “Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.”

I have often repeated these wise words and others in many of the posts that I have written because we humans often need to hear things over and over again to truly and deeply integrate what we are learning into the ways in which we live our lives. This has once again certainly been true for me.

And we need support along the way which empowers us to recognize our choices related to authenticity and whether we are blindly choosing to harden or to consciously open our hearts. It is my experience that understanding our individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma empowers us to unburden these legacies we have absorbed and to live increasingly out of our deepest values and intentions. 

Photo by Molly

It is both humbling and empowering to recognize the continuum that I believe we humans all fall on with these elements on either end:

Ignorance, fear, separation, hatred, greed, delusion ________________________________________

consciousness, connectedness, clarity, peace, compassion, love

If we are blessed in our lifetimes with ever evolving and expanding support, courage, healing, unburdening, and awareness, as we grow older the experience Fierce Love will come to be our most frequent companion. We will increasingly embody a depth of compassion and connectedness and Love.

And that said, oh my!, it has been such a long and arduous journey from carrying layers upon layers of my own individual, ancestral, and collective trauma to living a life increasingly unburdened from the trauma of our ancestors and all who have come before us and may still be part of our lives today.

Remembering the wise words of Mr. Rogers fills me with gratitude. There are many helpers among us! 

These are the wise ones who empower us to recognize and hold compassion for our many parts and those of others. They illuminate the sacred journey which increasingly frees us of our harsh inner critics and judging minds. And as our capacity for compassion, connection, clarity, and love grows, we are able to articulate and more consistently embody our intentions and lead Self-led lives.

And intentions are powerful! These are some of mine:

• To live my life as a prayer
• To do no harm
• To act in ways which facilitate breaking the intergenerational cycles of pain and trauma for my beloved children
• To heal, unburden, and transform the individual, ancestral, and collective legacy burdens I've inherited and absorbed 
• To remember, recognize, bless, and honor the Sacred woven through all of life
• To work to alleviate the suffering within myself and all others
• To remember beauty, generosity, and engage in random acts of kindness wherever possible
• To create ripples of healing rather than harm

I am moved to end with sharing this recent resource which I have discovered and now purchased — Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide To Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma.  Richard Schwartz, Thomas Hübl, and Fatimah Finney illuminate pathways, tools, and consciousness of how, without exception, we humans are all impacted by legacy burdens rooted in individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma and how we can heal. This is a brilliant, beautiful, wise, and compassionate resource which you too may find deeply helpful.

Bless us all on our journeys,

💜

Molly

Photo by Molly

EXCELLENT — Bruce Fanger: The New Killable Class

 This is what we need to recognize, understand,

 and expose again and again! This madness

must be stopped!! — Molly

The New Killable Class

How a Manufactured Enemy Gave the White House a Blank Check for War.

White Rose (December 4, 2025)

Bruce Fanger

The signs are familiar to anyone who has lived through America’s quieter, undeclared wars. First come the shapeless “threats,” crafted to fit whatever action the White House already wants to take. Then the labels, stretched wide enough to cover any target that needs killing. Then the bodies. By the time the public figures out what’s happening, the operation has already settled into routine. What’s unfolding now in the Caribbean fits that pattern far too cleanly to ignore.

These strikes have been on my radar since the first scattered reports of boats blown apart and civilians left in the water. The denials didn’t match the facts. The facts kept shifting. And underneath that shifting ground sat the same suspicion many of us picked up on immediately: this never looked like a real drug mission. In a previous piece, I talked about oil and how it looms behind everything Washington is doing in this region. But even readers coming in cold can recognize what’s happening now. The method is giving the motive away.

America doesn’t start these things with declarations anymore. It starts them with language. Before a missile is fired, someone in a polished office invents the kind of enemy the government is allowed to kill without congressional approval, public evidence, or meaningful oversight. In this case, the phrase was “narcoterrorist maritime actors.” No legal definition. No past usage. No boundaries. Yet suddenly powerful enough to turn a fishing boat into a legitimate target and a fisherman into a combatant. Once that phrase appeared at the podium, the legal terrain shifted under everyone’s feet.

Oil explains why the White House wanted freedom to act. This manufactured enemy explains how they seized it.

From there, the pattern hardened. The September 2 strike wasn’t an accident or a fog-of-war tragedy. It was the debut of a doctrine. Hit the boat. Hit it again if anyone survives. Let the sea erase the evidence. Let the press secretary wrap the whole thing in talk of “self-defense” and “standing authorities.” Let the lawyers backfill the justification. And by the time the truth leaks out, everything tangible is already at the bottom of the Caribbean.

That is what executive power looks like when it outruns the law. Congress never authorized force in Venezuela. It certainly never authorized force against this invented category of “maritime terrorists.” Lawmakers weren’t even shown a shred of evidence that would satisfy a Coast Guard trainee. Yet the administration behaves as if authorization is something it can award itself simply by renaming the people it kills.

The Pentagon’s unease spills into every briefing. The language is careful, strained, defensive. Officers talk like people trying to walk a tightrope over a fire they didn’t light. They know these operations sit in the gray zone between illegal and “plausibly defensible.” When the vocabulary grows ornate, the underlying order is usually rotten.

And let’s be honest about this part. No one who has ever worked around real counter-narcotics operations would mistake the Caribbean strikes for one. Legitimate interdiction leaves a trail. Seized cargo. Arrested crew. Phone records. Fuel logs. Satellite intercepts. Intelligence you can build on. Here, each mission ends the same way. No boardings. No seizures. No forensics. No survivors. Just shattered hulls slipping under the surface. A strategy that destroys evidence is not a strategy meant to stop traffickers. It’s meant to stop questions.

A blown-apart boat cannot embarrass the administration.

A dead fisherman cannot contradict the narrative.

A classified justification can paper over anything.

And that’s the point. The operation makes perfect sense if the real mission is impunity. It makes no sense at all if the real mission is drugs.

The deeper danger isn’t even geographical. It’s doctrinal. Once a president discovers he can create a killable class by inventing the right label, that authority never stays where it starts. It wanders. It looks for new targets. It follows political incentives. Today the label is pasted onto Venezuelan boats. Tomorrow, the pressure points shift north.

And Mexico sits directly in the crosshairs of that political logic. The fentanyl crisis is raw and real. The polling is brutal. The rhetoric is already halfway there. All someone has to do is declare that cartel labs qualify as “terrorist infrastructure,” and suddenly a president has a blank check to strike across the border without a vote, without oversight, without consequence. The bridge between narrative and policy is already being built in cable monologues, Senate trial balloons, and think tank whisper campaigns.

I’ve watched this pattern evolve before. The first CIA drone strike in Yemen didn’t matter because of who died. It mattered because of what the killing made permissible afterward. That one strike opened a door that stayed open for twenty years. Today we are watching another door being cracked open, this time in the Caribbean, under the cover of a drug war that doesn’t exist. A president is claiming the right to kill civilians at sea based on a category he invented, backed by evidence he refuses to show, justified by a legal theory that evaporates the moment anyone actually tests it.

Once this becomes practice, it becomes precedent. And once it becomes precedent, it becomes template. It becomes a way of doing business. It becomes part of the American vocabulary of force.

And the first victims of a new doctrine are always the ones the government believes nobody will defend. People without names in the American press. People whose deaths can be explained away with a shrug and a slogan. The people in that September 2 wreck were disposable. The eleven dead on the ferry were treated as disposable. The others who died before and after them were never meant to be remembered at all.

But doctrines never stop with the disposable. They start with them.

And if no one in power says no, the day eventually comes when that manufactured category expands far beyond the waters where it was first tested. That is why this moment matters. That is why the language matters. And that is why this quiet, creeping war deserves every ounce of scrutiny it’s finally beginning to get.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Annotated Sources

New York Times coverage of U.S. Caribbean strikes, denials, confirmations, and terminology shifts

Washington Post reporting on Admiral Bradley’s orders and Pentagon internal conflict

PBS and NPR investigations into lack of evidence recovered from destroyed vessels

UNODC World Drug Report 2025 on trafficking routes and Venezuela’s minor role

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2025 on fentanyl origins and cartel structure

Statements by Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the UN on ferry victims and ICC referral

SOUTHCOM and Pentagon transcripts using “self-defense” and “narcoterrorist maritime actors”

Congressional statements from Senators Rosen, Tillis, Himes, and King regarding legality and oversight

Academic analyses of post-9/11 targeted killing doctrine, especially Yemen 2002 precedent

InSight Crime and WOLA research on Cartel de los Soles as corruption network rather than cartel

White House briefing transcripts confirming Hegseth’s authorization of the second strike

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

#WhiteRoseUSA #ExecutiveOverreach #CaribbeanStrikes #WarPowers #InternationalLaw #AccountabilityNow #VenezuelaCrisis #FentanylPolitics #OilAndWar #PentagonLeaks

EXCELLENT — Oil, Lies, and Eleven Dead

 Excellent piece!

Oil, Lies, and Eleven Dead

The United States didn’t bomb drug traffickers. It bombed civilians in the Caribbean — and the cover story isn’t holding.

White Rose (December 3, 2025)

Bruce Fanger

The strange thing about the new American drug war in the Caribbean is how little it resembles a drug war. If you listen to the White House, Venezuela has somehow become the fentanyl capital of the Western Hemisphere and every wooden fishing skiff is a floating Sinaloa superlab. None of it is true, and they know it’s not true. In 2024 the DEA’s own National Drug Threat Assessment ranked Venezuela fourteenth among cocaine transit countries, behind the Dominican Republic, behind Jamaica, behind freighters flying flags nobody can pronounce. Fentanyl was mentioned exactly zero times in connection with Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Chinese laboratories and Mexican production lines. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. Venezuela is a minor transit country at best. Yet here we are, firing missiles at boats and pretending these skiffs were hours away from poisoning American teenagers. The storyline is so flimsy it falls apart under its own syntax, but it soldiers on because it has to. It is the fig leaf that keeps the public from seeing what this operation is actually about.

To understand that, you have to go back almost twenty years, to the moment the world’s largest oil reserves slipped out of American hands. In 2007 Venezuela forced foreign operators into minority positions in its Orinoco Belt projects. Most companies accepted the new terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips refused. They walked out, their assets were nationalized, and their claims were annihilated in international arbitration. It was one of the largest expropriations in the history of the modern energy sector. The bitterness lingers beneath everything Washington does in the region. It is the quiet resentment of a superpower that believes it was robbed and has spent nearly two decades waiting for the moment to claw back what it considers its rightful domain.

Even today, even battered and mismanaged, Venezuela runs on oil revenue. Ninety-five percent of its export income comes from the wells. The country is a petrostate by chemistry, not ideology. And while Americans debate fentanyl seizures at the border, the Gulf Coast refinery system is starving for the exact heavy crude Venezuela used to supply. China is sinking capital into the Orinoco. Russia is offering security guarantees. Iran is rebuilding refineries and pipelines. PDVSA is stumbling back toward partial recovery. If you’re an American administration desperate for cheap fuel optics and terrified of Beijing building a Western Hemisphere anchor, you don’t leave that situation alone. You poke it. You provoke it. You look for a justification to treat Venezuela’s coastline the way you treated Iraq’s airspace in 2003. You manufacture a threat where no threat exists.

That is what the boat strikes were. The first publicly acknowledged attack killed eleven people outright — passengers aboard a wooden vessel the Pentagon immediately labeled a “narco-smuggling boat.” Yet the details collapsed under scrutiny. And then, on November 14 and again on November 21, 2025, U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawks fired Hellfires into two more wooden boats off Venezuela’s coast, killing additional civilians. The Pentagon called them narco-subs. Satellite imagery showed nothing of the sort. What appeared instead was what every Caribbean coastal resident recognizes instantly: long open fiberglass peñeros with outboard Yamahas, the working boats of the region.

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour. They would need to refuel four or five times just to cross the Caribbean, or else carry so much fuel there would be no room left for anything else. These vessels aren’t designed for long transits. They are built for life along the archipelago. Gasoline in Venezuela is so cheap it’s practically a public utility, which is why peñeros are everywhere — ferrying families, fishermen, groceries, tools, workers, whatever the day requires.

And that matters because the first strike didn’t kill a cartel crew. It killed eleven people in a peñero. That is not a smuggling configuration. That is a ferry run — workers, relatives, or market-goers moving between coastal towns and islands the way they have for generations. These boats carry plantains to Grenada, cousins to Margarita, fishermen to the banks at dawn. They are the backbone of civilian life across the Lesser Antilles. Calling them narco-subs is not a misidentification. It is a lie crafted for people who have never lived near the Caribbean Sea.

The first missile was reckless. The second was deliberate. Survivors in the water don’t pose a national security threat, but they do pose a political one, because survivors talk. The point wasn’t interdiction. The point was messaging. It was the United States marking the Caribbean littoral as a zone of unilateral enforcement. A shadow blockade without naming it. A hint to Caracas that its shipping lanes, its export routes, and its access to world markets were now contingent on American pleasure. That is not drug policy. That is resource leverage dressed in tactical camouflage.

And now comes the talk of airspace. People underestimate how serious that step is. Closing another nation’s airspace isn’t a diplomatic reprimand. It is a confession that you no longer recognize that nation’s sovereignty. Every major conflict of the last fifty years began with some version of that move. Kosovo. Iraq. Gaza. You close the skies when you are preparing to strike targets beneath them. You close the skies when you want to control who enters and who leaves. You close the skies when you believe the next phase is military and you want the legal fiction on your side. If Trump and Hegseth close Venezuelan airspace, that is war in every meaningful sense, whether Congress debates it or not.

The drug narrative collapses on contact. Fentanyl is almost entirely a China-to-Mexico-to-border pipeline. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. None of that travels in peñeros. Yet here we are, bombing the only country in the region with minimal narcotics production but maximal petroleum wealth. You don’t need paranoia to notice the contradiction. You only need a map and a memory.

This is the old American story in a new costume. Iraq was sold as a WMD crisis that happened to sit on top of massive oil reserves. Afghanistan was counterterrorism layered atop mineral corridors and pipeline dreams. And now Venezuela, the country with the most oil on Earth, is being framed as the beating heart of the fentanyl crisis. It’s too neat. Too convenient. Too familiar. The policy makes no sense until you invert it. Pretend the oil is the point and the drugs are the excuse. Suddenly the entire puzzle locks into place.

The danger is where this leads. If Washington keeps escalating, if the rhetoric hardens and the airspace closes and the shadow blockade becomes a declared one, we may stumble into a war no one voted for and no one truthfully explained. A war sold as a narcotics crackdown but understood privately as an attempt to claw back lost resource dominance. A war born not of fentanyl flowing through Caribbean waters but of Exxon losing an arbitration case eighteen years ago and American power refusing to swallow the insult.

The truth is simple. Venezuela does not have a fentanyl problem. It does not have a cocaine empire. It has oil. A lot of it. More than anyone. Enough to make superpowers lie with conviction. Enough to make men like Hegseth imagine themselves as historical actors. Enough to make a peñero look like a threat worthy of missiles. When the story is this crooked, the motive is always straight.

Annotated Sources

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 — Venezuela ranked 14th among cocaine transit countries; no fentanyl link

Source: U.S. DEA, NDTA 2024 report

https://www.dea.gov/.../2024-national-drug-threat-assessment

U.S. Strikes and Casualty Count — first strike killed 11; U.S. justification disputed

Source: AP News, CBS News reporting on Sept–Nov 2025 incidents

https://apnews.com

https://cbsnews.com

Venezuela boat type misidentification — peñeros identified via satellite analysis

Source: Reuters regional reporting & maritime imagery reviews

https://reuters.com

Orinoco Belt nationalization & Exxon/Conoco arbitration history

Source: ICSID arbitration records + Financial Times coverage

https://icsid.worldbank.org

https://ft.com

Venezuela oil dependency (90–95% of export revenue)

Source: OPEC & World Bank indicators

https://opec.org

https://worldbank.org

Hashtags

#OilLiesAndElevenDead #Venezuela #WarPowers #Hegseth #FentanylMyth #Caribbean #WhiteRoseUSA #HumanRights #ForeignPolicy #TruthMatters