If only hierarchies of injury didn’t just create new opportunities to inflict pain. Some classes of people will be at the bottom—their traumas “not as bad” as others’—and our history shows that it’s the same classes of people at the bottom every time.

Total access has to be the goal. Otherwise, we will stop short when things get hard and keep remaking the structure that brought us to where we are. My hope for unlimited trauma resources is boundless, but my hope for the complete eradication of our equally large measure of racism before we do that is, well, not.

Our biggest problem is the people who need help and refuse to admit it. If I could, I’d invite them to just be traumatized. Ted Cruz, my friend, you have suffered. Tucker Carlson, I believe you are as confused and angry as you look. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have a seat, here’s some mushrooms. (Just a thought.)

Some of them are the people who made panicked phone calls from the Capitol on January 6. How do we make them part of the story when they won’t even say the words?

If I could, I’d invite them to just be traumatized. Ted Cruz, my friend, you have suffered. Tucker Carlson, I believe you are as confused and angry as you look. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have a seat, here’s some mushrooms. (Just a thought.)

To extend a place in our group therapy circle to those who have materially benefited from the upheaval in all our lives does not have to minimize the anguish of anyone else. Bessel van der Kolk is not wrong to distinguish between the relative comfort of the privileged and the deepening circumstances of the non-privileged. Middle-class white people’s new struggles are not oppression. But preemptively deciding that their pain doesn’t count is one reason we are where we are now.

And the upside of daring to include the disgruntled naysayers is vast. Validating the trauma of people who only vaguely recognize their own experience can open up the conversation among all of us. Emphasizing the shared experience lays the groundwork for carefully and honestly acknowledging the differences. We might even talk about the systemic reasons why privileged people’s experience of trauma feels so special and new to them.

My hope is that then we would smash the system that separated us in the first place, because capitalism usually finds a way to undo any progress people make toward wholeness … but my ability to imagine positive outcomes has already been stretched to its limit, and I realize even the invitation to connect is asking too much.

Cruz, Carlson, and the indefatigable MTG et alia don’t want to be included. They’ll refuse our invitation. They will do more than refuse it. They will raise money off of it as it dominates news cycles. This outsize response would then (as the research shows) quite possibly retraumatize everyone, including them. We know how it would play out, because we’ve already seen how the right frames almost any plea for kindness and grace: Fuckin’ snowflakes, amiright? Defensiveness at that amplitude is a trauma response, obviously. So I’ve heard in countless 12-step meetings: “You spot it, you got it.” I’m not sure how we shake them loose from the illusion that they are, in fact, delicate snowflakes, too.

If the destruction visited on us these past few years has shown us anything, it’s that privilege never protects anyone completely from the grip of the system: Being white won’t save white people from capitalism; patriarchy won’t save men from sexual assault; supporting Trump won’t save you from a rampaging mob of Trump supporters.

Privilege does allow people to ignore the downstream effects of their trauma; privilege demands it. The Congress members who have disavowed the fear they clearly felt on January 6 (there are recordings of them displaying it!) have done so because the fear of losing power now frightens them more than the fear of losing their lives did then. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Mike Pence for anything, but my heart does ache a tiny bit over how he’s been made an example of. He has refused to deny the extremity of being shuttled around the Capitol by the Secret Service because the president suggested a lynching, and that threatens the delusion that a red hat protects you from getting your head bashed in. He’s not sticking to the story.

The stories we tell ourselves about what protects us—whiteness, ableism, gender binaries, heteronormativity, and class—are only stories, enormously powerful stories that do offer partial protection as they inflict harm on others. These categories don’t keep people safe; they exist so that some can think of themselves as more safe than other people. These stories create the illusion of security via separation. Privilege may keep you from certain kinds of risks, but it won’t make you resilient. Only community can.

Inviting grace for the people who have done terrible things is another change to the narrative. It might be the most revolutionary one.

Maladaptive trauma responses are difficult to undo because they feel as if they work, sort of. A gun won’t make you more safe, but it might make you feel more safe. Drinking and drugs don’t make you less lonely, but you don’t care as much about it.

We are not wrong to worry about the future, if only because we are dealing with our experience in such destructive ways. But the opposite of feeling afraid about the future isn’t certainty about one’s safety. The opposite of feeling afraid is confidence that you will get through the thing you’re afraid of. Recovering from trauma isn’t about preventing the possibility of ever being hurt again. It’s about coming to accept that you were hurt and that you can heal … and do it again if necessary.

Studies of torture survivors have found that activists “emerge as less traumatized than nonactivists, even though activists often experience more torture.” Specifically, those “having no commitment to a cause or activist group or prior expectations of arrest or torture” reported higher levels of distress. What’s more, among activists who were tortured, those with a strong commitment to their cause were the least likely to have symptoms of PTSD.

No one can say exactly what cushions activists but doesn’t protect everyone. Maybe activists saw their suffering as part of a larger story? First, they knew what they were doing risked retribution; second, they believed it was worth it; third, the goal that made the risk worthwhile was a shared one. They weren’t taking the risk alone or just for their own sakes; their resilience was rooted in not being alone.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor whose experiences led him to focus on our search for life’s meaning, might argue that activists’ connections to a larger group and greater goals created meaning; perhaps understanding yourself as part of a community establishes a sense of meaning before anything bad ever happens.

Mending, bringing together, reconnecting. We have to remember that the wound we’re healing either already existed or had created an area so fragile it would shatter at the lightest touch. Being in a community feels like an improvement on human relations in general. But maybe it’s how we were always supposed to be.