January 18, 2021
Lisa Montgomery and Dr. King
TW: descriptions of child abuse and murder
On this day of remembering Dr King, I point to the recent execution of Lisa Montgomery.
Our current governance is built on little to no knowledge or acknowledgement of how trauma is passed down from body to body. Lisa Montgomery was executed on January 12. Look at the face of this sweet child. According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, Lisa “suffer[ed] from brain damage and severe mental illness that result[ed] in dissociation and psychosis...She was beaten and sexually trafficked by her mother and stepfather, who built a special room where he and his friends repeatedly raped, sodomized, and even urinated on Lisa.”
In 2004, Lisa murdered a pregnant woman and stole the baby, claiming it as her own, before she was arrested. Of course she did—she was filled with lifetimes of rage and grief spurred by her parents’ horrific treatment of her, which is textbook trauma being passed down. Who knows how her parents were treated as children. This behavior is cyclical and it DOES NOT STOP until individuals in these acute cycles of deadly trauma encounter kindness, compassion, and professional help to discharge the trauma. The death penalty does not end this cycle. Even after “justice is served,” it doesn’t change the fact that others encountered Lisa and were harmed by her cycle of trauma, especially the family of her victims.
Incarceration and the death penalty are how we have managed wrong-doings for so long because we did not understand the cycle of trauma. We know better now. If we understand trauma, we understand that the death penalty is not justice. If we understand trauma, we understand that our for-profit, brutally-packed, racially-disproportionate prison system based on punishment and not rehabilitation is not justice. I can guarantee you that every single person in our prison system today is either innocent and/or committed crime because they are “guilty” of carrying systemic trauma, which we all carry. Inmates happen to be the poor souls being the most punished for the systems of trauma we are all a part of but many of us cannot or refuse to look at, including the traumatized persons “profiting” from them continuing.
The antidote? On this day of remembering Dr King, I point toward his “beloved community,” of which we are all a part and which we all serve. Trauma causes us to want to hide from each other and hide from these excruciating realities in our lives. Accepting that we live in a traumatized world, that trauma can be healed, and that we need each other to do so is the antidote. Finding a community, even if that’s one person, who can hold us and help us feel all the hard things we’ve been holding, witness us as we let go of these traumatic patterns, is the antidote. We heal the world’s trauma when we heal our own. And we experience the growth of our capacity to hold others as they do the same. Like trauma, healing is also a cycle. Let’s pass this one on instead. We must for our most vulnerable, those in our prisons, those with mental illness, those in the throes of the most harmful traumatic patterning.