What iZombie Says About Living With Trauma
The moral case for working your way through trauma and learning to live with it.
Author’s Note: Since I’ve gotten so many new subscribers recently, I thought I should mention that this piece was part of the early access for paid subscribers in June. You can also check out the current early access pieces here from July and here from August, with a new one coming next week.
We all have some kind of trauma.
Things in our past that we'd like to forget and move forward from. Some of us have more trauma than others, but all of us have it. It could be something like being humiliated by someone they care about or actually being harmed physically. A natural human response is to get away from the experience. To make it something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. What does it matter if the world is going to end? Or if we're all going to die anyway from cancer or natural disaster or a fast spreading disease of some kind? These terrible potential events seem far more important. Yet when it comes right down to it, these traumatic experiences will be front and centre in your mind. Even if we don't want them to.
Perhaps when you least want them, for instance during a heated conversation with a client or a lover. That isn't necessarily the best thing. Especially because the trauma doesn't just affect you. It ends up impacting the people around you. Not to mention the people around you end up affecting others, spreading almost like a virus from person to person. Your trauma isn't just about you, it's about the other people around you as well. In order to find a way to avoid having it spread, you have to find a way to deal with your problem.
Liv Moore is a perfect example of what that's like. She went through a traumatic experience when she was actually killed. Sadly, she has to learn to live with being dead, somewhat ironically. As a result of the trauma she's experienced, she interrupts the lives of all the people around her. Breaking up with Major, quitting her job, putting distance between her and her family not to mention her best friend Peyton. All of the things she's doing to come to terms with her
own trauma will often create trauma in those around her. In turn, they have an impact on those around them, creating an ever expanding destructive power. Which obviously starts from Liv herself. If only she could find a way to deal with her own trauma, she could prevent this from happening. Yet some part of her simply can't find a way around it. At least not without some type of help.
One of the best ways to deal with trauma is to confront it directly, like with fear. To feel it in all the pain and suffering it tends to cause. Some times even more than the event which created the trauma in the first place. It's a difficult process but if you allow yourself to feel it, you can end up in so much of a better place emotionally. However, it's far from the only way for a person like Liv to deal with the trauma. Seeking out other people who have similar trauma and learning to understand what they're going through can be instrumental in dealing with your own. Which is part of what makes the journey that Liv is on, especially within the first season, so fascinating.
Eating other people's brains allows Liv to take on the pain and suffering of those she's found through her job. She can feel what they felt, experience what they experienced. Many cases involve the murder victims living with the type of issue she's dealing with. Whether it's grief over the loss of a loved one, conflict with a lover, or work problems, some of them will help Liv work through her own problems.
Outside of Liv and perhaps Blaine, Major is the one who goes through the most trauma in large part thanks to what Liv does to him. Thanks to Liv breaking up with him, he focuses on his work with under privileged teens. As a result, he becomes obsessed with the fact that some of them have gone missing. He decides to go looking for them which puts him in all kinds of dangers he's not aware of. At least not at first. It creates all kinds of problems for him as he tries to figure out what happened to these kids because of Blaine. This leads him down the path to all kinds of pain and suffering, both physically and emotionally.
So much so that the experiences he has makes him completely change his view of the world and the people in it multiple times. Once he discovers the existence of zombies, he becomes obsessed with the idea of eliminating them. He does this in part because he's not aware that Liv herself is a zombie. When he does find out, he becomes resentful of her for not being honest about what happened to her and why their relationship ended the way it did. His anti-zombie views of the world don't necessarily last long however. As soon as he realizes that the simplistic view of zombies versus humans doesn't take into account the fact that zombies and humans are a lot more a like than he thinks, he can't help but change his thinking.
The way he struggles with this conflict between zombies and humans will at many points bring him into conflict with Liv. Despite his love for Liv and a desire to find some kind of compromise, neither of them can entirely agree with the best path forward. Having to go through this creates a lot of pain and suffering on Major's part. Over the course of the series, he's beaten up multiple times as a human, shot and nearly killed several times, before ultimately becoming a zombie himself and struggling to find an identity among the other zombies he has met. Which doesn't mean that he somehow escapes any kind of trauma as a zombie by any means. In becoming a zombie, much like Liv herself Major has to struggle with all the things he is going to miss out on by being so obviously a zombie.
It's important to distinguish the idea of trauma from the feeling of grief. While they have very similar aspects to them and can be connected, they have important differences. For instance, if you're in an accident and someone dies, whether someone you personally know or not, you can experience both grief and trauma at the same time. The fact that you're going through them at the same time can make the process of learning to deal with them much more difficult. It can naturally compound the problem to have to deal with both. However, there are benefits to living with both. Being able to deal with one often has an effect on the other. Physical pain and the process of recovery can allow you the opportunity to make your trauma go away, or at least become much less of a problem for you.
We see this distinction most clearly in the differences between how characters like Liv and Blaine handle the situations they find themselves in. While Liv chooses to wallow in the sadness of her circumstances, at least in the beginning, Blaine views his circumstances to his benefit. Even though they've experienced some of the same difficult situations like the boat party, Liv has her life completely destroyed whereas Blaine decides to get into the brain business and create his own customer base of zombies so he can make money. The trauma is the same but the reaction to it is decidedly different. He doesn't grieve for his old life in the way that Liv does.
At least initially, Liv can't do much more than grieve for her old life. The things she can never do, the places she can't go and the relationships she'll never have again. It's typical of people who experience trauma that things no longer have the same value they used to. What seemed important has the power of it turned down or completely eliminated. In part this is because the trauma becomes everything to the person who went through it. For Liv, she literally can't do many things she otherwise would. Or she could but she runs the risk of hurting other people even more than she already has. Anything could end up giving them the virus she's living with that makes her a zombie. Rather than take the risk, she prefers to avoid everything. Something that is in stark contrast to what Blaine is doing with his circumstances.
Which isn't to say that Blaine doesn't have his own trauma he's dealing with. As we get to know him more deeply despite all the terrible things he's doing, it becomes clear that part of why he's doing it is thanks to how he was raised and the people who were supposed to love him. People like his father Angus and his caretaker who his father paid to look after him rather than do so himself. She punished him in ways that couldn't help but give him trauma. However, the experience he's had with trauma allows Blaine to deal with it in other ways than Liv does. He uses trauma as an excuse for the bad things he's doing now. Whether it's turning rich humans into zombies and blackmailing them into paying him for the brains he's now forced them to eat, or murdering homeless or otherwise traumatized teenagers to provide these brains to his rich clients. All of it can be blamed on what happened to him as a kid.
At least that's what he wants to believe. Over time, it becomes clear to him through his interactions with Liv and the people around her that he can't blame it on his trauma. That he has to move beyond it in some serious way. He can learn to embrace who he is and what he does without using his trauma as an excuse. Blaine simply likes being the kind of person who is willing to take advantage of being a zombie and kill whoever he wants without feeling bad about it. The problem he encounters however is that being able to embrace this doesn't make him any more popular or at least less hated than he was. People don't like criminals who hurt people indiscriminately for their own benefit.
Similar to Blaine, Liv is able to accept herself as well it just takes her a lot more time and effort. By the end of the first season and moving forward into the others, she learns to understand the trauma she's experienced better and enjoy her life. Even though she can't do things like have a relationship or enjoy the company of her friends in the same way, she can build new connections. Both with new people in circumstances like her own such as fellow zombies, but also work towards getting Major and Peyton and even Clive to enjoy the person she now is. To the point that she's able to trust them with the secret of why she changed herself so drastically.
As a consequence, they have a much deeper relationship to each other. So much so that they're willing to give her the benefit of the doubt when she goes through the changes she does when she eats brains. They love her enough to trust that what she's doing to them isn't intentional. That she's doing it for a better cause. This allows Liv the space and time to come to terms with her trauma in a way she never thought she could.
Sadly, not everyone can eat other people's brains and go through the process of experiencing the world from other people's perspectives. At least not to the extent and through the process that she does. But it is possible to understand it by watching Liv go through the process herself. In the same way that Liv experiences other people's trauma by eating their brains, you can learn through experiencing hers by watching the show. It's a powerful story and definitely worth your time to go through. You should take the time to watch iZombie and learn to live with trauma in the best way possible.
Check out iZombie as soon as you can to understand trauma better.
iZombie is available on Amazon as well as Netflix in the United States.
Wow, sounds like a complex and fascinating show concept. Really interesting piece!