‘Women, Madness, Whiteness’ poetry collection released Sept. 8 by Village Books and Paper Dreams
I have been writing “Women, Madness, Whiteness” since I was an overwhelmed and confused teenager trying to figure out the wild ride of my mother’s madness. When I was a little girl, my mother was institutionalized and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. While I understood that her behaviors were odd and at times scary and unsettling, I also understood that what was happening was connected in some ways to abuse and trauma. I understood that the adults in my world who struggled to help never talked about her pain, just her “symptoms,” and never mentioned abuse, just talked about how medication would help. This was confusing. It seemed obvious to me that her behaviors were connected in some way to pain.
Later, as an adult, I developed language and a more complex and layered understanding of intergenerational abuse and systems of oppression. I understood how symptoms of mental illness, dislocated from history, from culture, and from context offer diagnostic languages to explain what I view as stories of survival. Psychology diagnoses individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder while never considering the conditions that normalize violence and the intergenerational brutalities that create human beings that violate and abuse one another. This dissonance was overwhelming when I was a young girl trying to understand what was happening. I did understand the impact and was confused why adults in my world were not connecting the dots. When we adopted a dog with a history of abuse, and he snarled at kindness, we understood this was trauma. But when my mother snarled, in her own way, we named it mental illness. Why?
As a young adult still grappling with the “why,” I discovered the chaotic and messy driving rhythms and thunderous drumbeats of punk rock. The scattered snippets of memories and emotional residue from what happened became stories and poems and then lyrics for songs when I started singing in bands.
The music reflected the painful chaos roiling inside me, and the political lyrics spoke to the injustices my child self-registered.
As an adult, my commitment to understanding and striving to address injustice motivated me to study history and psychology and learn about gender violence, racialized trauma, colonialism and resistance movements for social change and liberation.
I moved to Seattle, joined a band and continued to write and sing and perform spoken word. In the ’90s, a friend in the music community was raped and murdered, and a group of artists and musicians started a community organization called Home Alive. Home Alive offered free self-defense and boundary setting classes. I helped develop boundary setting and self-defense curricula rooted in anti-oppression and the understanding that while we need skills to prevent violence, we also need to develop community responses that attend to the social, cultural and political root causes and conditions that make violence and abuse seem inevitable.
At Home Alive, I collaborated with several groups, including The Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity. At NWCHD, I supported cultural organizing projects with rural and suburban communities in the Pacific Northwest attempting to counter rising and mainstreaming white nationalist movements in their communities.
During this time, I became a politicized mental health therapist supporting healing rooted in liberation and attending to collective and intergenerational trauma.
In other words, my life path has involved a striving to understand the conditions, past, present and future, that bolster violence and power-over abuse, while also attempting to heal and metabolize, individually and collectively, the pain and trauma these systems transmit.
These experiences braid an individual story into collective understanding of ancestral trauma, of the madness of colonialism and white supremacy and gendered strategies of refusal and resistance alongside appeasement and collusion.
The seeds of “Women, Madness, Whiteness” were sewn in my child bones bearing witness to familial violence. These seeds germinated over adulthood as I began to understand how the symptoms of madness are a language and expression asking to be witnessed. Eventually some of these seeds sprouted into songs and poems, stories and essays, which became the fruit for words that became the entity that is “Women, Madness, Whiteness. “
—By Cristien Storm
Cristien Storm is a writer, activist and politicized mental health therapist. She is the author of “Empowered Boundaries: Speaking Truth,” “Setting Boundaries and Inspiring Social Change” and the visionary creator of the online anthology “Once Upon A…Portals of Imaginal Practice,” a collection of stories, poems, artwork, songs, incantations and fairytales exploring and cultivating practices of imagining beyond white body supremacy culture and colonialism.