Kendrick Lamar on Trauma and Transformation
Kendrick Lamar's sprawling new album Mr Morale & the Big Steppers is a personal meditation on human universals. Healing, family, trauma, grief, faith, guilt, violence, promiscuity, forgiveness, shame; it spans the gamut of human experience. He is a great modern artist with a keen sense for what matters and the kind of courage to express it which only the artist possesses. The relevance of this album to psychotherapy is that Kendrick has been doing his own therapy. He raps about it consistently throughout the album. About his own brokenness and his attempts to repair it through sex and fame. But he is also candid about the futility of addictive processes and speaks of the therapeutic and artistic processes of personal healing. One could write a Phd on the album, such is its span and intimacy. But I want to focus on a single track, Mother I Sober, which deals with the nature of trauma, both personal and transgenerational.
First, a few words about trauma. It is a concept which rapidly found its way into the zeitgeist in recent decades. As with all things, its introduction into the mainstream has its pros and cons. It is of course a good thing that we have more awareness and understanding of trauma. We now know a lot about the way trauma affects the mind and the body, how it disrupts the sense of self and the effect it has on relationships. We know that childhood trauma is the most disastrous experience in terms of development, about how it affects the nervous system and gets stored in the body through biological mechanisms. All these insights are leading to greater and greater effectiveness in treatment. The downside of this popularity is that the term "trauma" has become sanitized. There is a common and well-known problem known as "concept creep". This happens with harm-related concepts when they are expanded to include criteria outside of how the concept was originally defined. Eventually so much is subsumed under the concept that it starts losing potency. It starts to mean too much. With respect to trauma, we find increasingly that what was once a difficult situation or experience, is being re-defined as traumatic. There are important differences between what is difficult and what is traumatic. But the issue is not simply semantic. The watering down of terms has important implications. It can affect genuinely traumatised individuals by dissolving perceived severity of their experience. Because when something comes to mean everything, it comes to mean nothing.
Back to Kendrick and his perspective on trauma. The form of the song itself is interesting. It comes after over an hour of intense chaos as a soft, melancholic movement. It is almost out of place. There is space here not found in much else of the album. He raps in a detached sort of way, expressing the dissociative features which characterise the traumatic experience. In dissociation, the traumatised person is disconnected from reality, they "space out" in order to anaesthetise their psychological pain. Whilst it is an adaptive defense which works to protect the individual, it also leads to disruptions in one's sense of continuity, coherence and well-being. The song begins with this as its feeling tone. He opens: "I'm sensitive. I feel everything. I feel everybody". Here we are introduced to another dimension of the traumatic experience, one that lies in opposition to dissociation; hypersensitivity. This often results from a chronic over-activation of the nervous system in response to the trauma. People feel their psyches as a raw wound. Everything they contact affects them. This causes them to isolate themselves, and often precipitates dissociative features. Being in relationship can be painful, so they find themselves in a proverbial Catch-22. The very thing they need in order to heal – relationship -- is that which causes the most pain. This is especially true when the trauma has been inflicted relationally, as in domestic violence and sexual abuse. What happens in relationship, however, also affects what happens to our sense of who we are. Our identity.
He speaks of "the broken pieces of me // it was all a blur" as if from a distance, in a flat tone. In these simple lines there is insight into the role of time and memory in regards to trauma and the self. The memory of those who have suffered trauma is almost always profoundly affected. Either the memory of the event is imprinted in great and unbearable detail, and the person is unable to escape it; or the memory is missing, present only as an absence, or a "blur". When forced beyond our ability to cope, there is an impairment in the ability to integrate autobiographical narrative memory, which means the personality structure itself becomes desiccated and fragmented. Thus, we often hear of the "broken pieces" of a self chronically under threat. For this reason, self-hood is profoundly disturbed through trauma. The haunting hook in the chorus comes in to reiterate the sense of being disconnected and alienated from any core sense of selfhood: "I wish I was somebody, anybody but myself". He cannot bear to be himself, since he is burdened by guilt.
As the song progresses there are several allusions to the weight of guilt. Kendrick watched his mother abused and feels guilty for not having done anything to stop it: "Black and blue, the image of my queen that I can't erase // to this day can't look her in the eyes, pain is taking over // you ain't felt guilt til you felt it sober". The sense of guilt that comes following a traumatic experience is common. Particularly in children, whose little minds have no way of processing what has occurred, and who tend to blame themselves to protect the relationships with their caregivers and other adults on whom they depend. It is psychologically unbearable to accept the badness of the other, and so that sense of badness is often turned against the self where it has a corrosive effect over time.
Stylistically, the song begins to build in the third verse. The musical space begins to fill, his voice rises in volume and picks up in pace. You get the sense that he is finding some strength, coherence and clarity. That he is painfully healing. For me, the real art of this song is through the form, rather than the content (which is also brilliant). He is showing the listener, as well as telling. And with the building of the song, he notes that he's vulnerable: "Twenty years later trauma has resurfaced // amplified as I wrote this song, I shiver 'cause I'm nervous". This is often the beginning of healing. The ability to confront pain and the confrontation with vulnerability.
And then he leaves the personal and addresses the social: "A conversation still not being addressed in black families // the devastation haunting generations and humanity". Although he is writing in the context of American society, we might equally consider the effects of the transmission of trauma still experienced today in our Australian Indigenous populations. A topic on which much more could be written, and on which much more still needs to be said.
The final verse is a thing of beauty. He turns to his own healing, and the guilt and the hurt and the hatred that he seeks to set free: "this is transformation". He knows that unless he transforms his trauma, it will be transferred onto and into the next generation, because he himself inherited trauma from his mother, and her from generations before her. Trauma happens when the mind fails to respond to life appropriately. The mind gets stuck, trapped and torn. But healing is possible. Kendrick Lamar's album, and in particular the song Mother I Sober attests to that. It is an example of the innate generative quality of the human mind. That is, there is a drive in the mind toward organisation. When it comes to trauma, the healing process involves transforming what is "stuck" into something which is alive. It is a process of creativity and generativity. It has been observed that many artists have gone through trauma, and that they are often compelled to create. The archetype of "the tortured artist", although probably over blown, holds some merit. It is the creative urge that so often mobilises the healingresponse, and it is through that urge that one reaches for transformation.
