When Home Is Not Really Yours -Complex trauma and Housing instability

Imagine paying an astronomical proportion of your income for a small, ageing flat that you call home. You pay the rent, the electricity, furnish it, sleep there, eat there, grieve there and retreat there when the world becomes too much. It contains the private debris of ordinary life.

And yet, as often as every six months, a real-estate agent can enter that space to inspect it.

Perhaps they arrive in a suit. They walk through your bedroom, look at your bathroom and kitchen, and photograph the rooms in which you conduct the most private parts of your life.

Somehow, we have normalised this.

There is something almost ludicrous about the image. A person may hand over tens of thousands of dollars each year for the conditional privilege of occupying somebody else's appreciating asset, yet remain subject to recurring scrutiny to establish whether they are inhabiting it acceptably.

The absurdity would make an excellent cartoon. The consequences are less amusing.

Renting and the architecture of power

We often speak about renting as though it were an ordinary commercial transaction. It is not.

If I dislike the price of a television, I can choose not to buy it. If I dislike the conditions imposed by a restaurant, I can eat elsewhere. Housing is different because the alternative is not another consumer choice. The alternative may be homelessness.

That gives one side of the transaction enormous structural power.

Tenants can be expected to compete for ageing, poorly maintained or inadequate properties while surrendering extraordinary proportions of their income. They live with inspections, rent increases, lease insecurity and the fear that complaining about mold, heating or repairs may somehow place the tenancy at risk.

We have constructed a system in which one of life's most fundamental necessities is controlled substantially by private wealth, then treat the resulting imbalance as an ordinary marketplace.

It is anything but ordinary.

Housing instability is a mental-health issue

For people living with complex trauma, housing matters enormously. CPTSD is often rooted in prolonged experiences of danger, instability, powerlessness and coercion. Recovery requires predictability, privacy, autonomy and safety.

Housing insecurity can reproduce the opposite.

Will the rent rise again? Will the lease be renewed? Can I afford the next increase? What happens if I complain? What happens at the next inspection? Where will I go if I have to leave?

For a nervous system already trained to scan for danger, housing insecurity can become another architecture of threat.

Then we locate the resulting distress inside the individual and call it a mental-health problem, rather than asking what the environment is doing to that person's capacity to function.

Housing, employment and poverty are not separate problems

Our systems divide people into categories: housing, mental health, alcohol and other drugs, family violence, employment, homelessness.

Human lives do not arrive in separate funding streams.

Housing stress causes sleeplessness. Sleeplessness affects concentration and emotional regulation. Chronic stress impairs executive functioning. Poor executive functioning makes appointments, paperwork, budgeting and employment harder to manage. Employment instability reduces income. Reduced income increases housing insecurity. Housing insecurity deepens psychological distress.

Around the circle we go.

From the outside, we may see a person who repeatedly "fails" to maintain employment, attend appointments, save money, stop using substances or remain housed.

Perhaps we should ask a different question:

How much human functioning does chronic insecurity consume?

We frequently present employment as the great escape hatch from poverty, but work itself requires infrastructure. It requires sleep, transport, clean clothes, internet access, food, somewhere to shower, and enough psychological bandwidth to arrive reliably and function.

Housing stability is not simply the reward for employment.

It is one of the conditions that makes sustainable employment possible.

Addiction and the cage

Writer Johann Hari has argued against understanding addiction purely as an individual pathology. His work draws attention to the role of connection, environment, exclusion and social conditions.

This is useful when thinking about housing.

If you place someone in a cage, perhaps we should examine the cage before condemning the ways in which they try to survive inside it.

Our cages do not necessarily have bars. They can look like insecure housing, debt, trauma, loneliness, family violence, an empty refrigerator, a rejected housing application, a rent increase, or the knowledge that one unexpected bill may bring everything down.

Sometimes the cage looks respectable.

Sometimes it arrives in a suit carrying an iPhone.

Substance use does not occur in a vacuum. Alcohol and other drugs may become a means of numbing hyperarousal, traumatic memories, fear, shame, isolation or hopelessness.

And homelessness does not simply follow addiction. Addiction can follow homelessness.

Losing housing is itself deeply destabilising. Homelessness exposes people to violence, sleep deprivation, humiliation, social exclusion, physical danger and constant uncertainty. For someone already carrying trauma, substance use may emerge or escalate as a way of enduring those conditions.

This creates a vicious cycle. Housing instability contributes to distress. Distress may contribute to substance use. Substance dependence can then become another barrier to employment and housing. Homelessness deepens, trauma accumulates, and use may escalate.

Then society points to the substance use as evidence that the individual caused their own predicament.

We have mistaken an adaptation to intolerable circumstances for an explanation of how those circumstances arose.

This is why Housing First approaches matter. They reject the idea that people must demonstrate sobriety, compliance or "readiness" before deserving secure housing.

Housing is not the prize at the end of recovery. It is one of the conditions from which recovery becomes possible.

Family violence exposes the cruelty of the equation

Nowhere is the relationship between housing and power clearer than in family violence.

We still ask victim-survivors, "Why didn't you leave?"

Leave and go where?

To an unaffordable private rental market? Emergency accommodation? A motel room with children? Homelessness? Or back to the person using violence because, perversely, the violent home remains the only available home?

A person may be legally free to leave while being economically unable to do so.

That is not meaningful freedom.

Secure housing is not peripheral to family-violence intervention.

It is family-violence intervention.

The haves, the have-nots, and the inspection

Return to the rental inspection.

The tenant may have paid $25,000, $30,000 or more in rent over the year. They own none of the property. Their payments may service somebody else's mortgage or investment. Any increase in the property's value belongs to somebody else.

Then inspection time arrives.

The agent enters. The bedroom is inspected. The kitchen is photographed.

The image captures the paradox.

One person is accumulating wealth. The other is financing access to shelter.

One person's relationship with the property is investment.

The other's is survival.

And it is the the struggling tenant whose behaviour inside the building is scrutinised.

Imagine the cartoon: a tenant sits beneath a leaking ceiling surrounded by bills while an immaculate agent in a designer suit photographs a coffee cup on the kitchen bench.

"We're just checking that you're looking after the owner's investment."

Outside the window, the owner's investment has increased in value. Inside, the person paying for access to it wonders whether they can afford groceries.

Perhaps the cartoon is not exaggerated after all.

A society that cares

A society that cares does not simply demand resilience from people living inside systems that manufacture instability.

It creates the conditions in which people have a reasonable chance to recover and flourish.

That means affordable housing, security of tenure, dignity and privacy in the home, accessible mental-health care, trauma-informed responses, meaningful employment, genuine pathways out of family violence, and alcohol and other drug services grounded in connection rather than exclusion.

We cannot manufacture insecurity and then pathologise anxiety.

We cannot make housing unaffordable and blame people for financial instability.

We cannot exclude people experiencing addiction and then wonder why they remain disconnected.

We cannot tell victim-survivors to leave without ensuring there is somewhere safe to go.

And we cannot continue transferring wealth upward through housing while describing the resulting poverty as a collection of individual failures.

Perhaps the question is not why so many people struggle to function within this system.

Perhaps we should ask what the system is doing to people's capacity to function.

Because housing instability is no longer merely one symptom of poverty.

Increasingly, it is one of the machines producing it.

Ultimately, whether the term, 'The Personal Is Political' was actually coined by a feminist writer, (around which there seems to be some contention) it is extremely personal. When we are managing the stress carried by compounding issues, housing instability, family violence, mental health issues, financial concerns, we too often look at ourselves, trying to understand how we failed, where did it all go so horribly wrong?

Today, I assisted my 30 year old son who lives in a 2 bedroom flat with a friend. They were both experiencing debilitating anxiety over what are really matters for the REA to address.

A six month inspection had been planned. Aside from living on the sparse remnants of a centrelink payment that covers rent and some bills, they fear losing that last piece of security. The thing that gives them some small safety, and some small amount of dignity, the roof over their heads. The flat in which they live, not merely exist but live. They have dirty dishes, a second hand couch, a chip board coffee table from the side of the road. After 5 years or so or so. some marks on the standard issue brown carpet. The linoleum, I'd hazard a guess has been stuck on to that kitchen floor since the flats were built some 40-50 odd years ago. It is stained from the remnants of previous tenants. The window pane in the kitchen has white paint peeling, leaving patches of rotting wood. By all accounts, you might say this place is really in need of repair. But then there is the fear, what will happen? They are already angry with us because we pay rent when we are paid, rather than a month upfront in one neat sum. Sometimes one of them might forget to report to Centrelink. Not because they are busy doing nothing, but because surviving from day to day consumes more than most people have to give.

The rental increases have been absurd, and along with the 6 monthly inspection, camera at the ready, they are as frequent as legislation allows. They worry that it is now implausible to find an alternative. So yes, its personal, and maybe its not political because it's personal, but rather because it is simply political, and until the circumstances allowing this to continue change, the issues will simply cannot.