simsa03It is not just that people do much to stay inside the Omertà and thus: the family. It is not just that overtly displaying the Omertà is avoided because of the risk of falling outside the family.
People will also sacrifice possible partners, spouses, and relationships for the sake of upholding the Omertà.
There is nothing a possible partner can do about it. Because it is not personal. You fit or you don't.
Sacrificing a partner for the sake of upholding the Omertà is one option. Leaving the Omertà to go with the partner most often means chosing their Omertà. Refusing both options and aiming for a path for oneself, the other, and the couple one is, amounts to creating a new Omertà.
I'm not sure one should avoid Omertà altogether, nor whether it is appropriate to "face" it by means like reflection, introspection, open debate.
To me the important thing is to understand that Omertà is not eo ipso an evil or debilitating thing. Remember: It is also a source of joy, and a source of identity, and of feeling peculiar and special. It is where, in part, soul comes from.
It is just that both, Omertà and "We cloud", go together, are a package. And thus Omertà has a nourishing quality that gets easily overlooked when one thinks about these matters in the typical banal psychological way, i.e., with a focus on its traumatizing abilities.
The less people talk, the less things are torn into the open but can stay ambiguous and floating, the more premature verbalisation can be avoided.
Because this indeed is a feature, or trait, of Omertà, in a good as well as in a bad manner: Times when things get literal, and thus: one-diemsnional, are times when things get violent. Keeping things ambiguous means keeping various futures open. And with that: hope.
Literal times are times without hope, without a sense that things might turn out completely different, and turn out so even, or especially, without our contributions. It is this very openness to (or of) the future that gets lost when things get pinned down verbally.
Omertà thus conserves time, creates a container or vessel for a specific body of time, apart from others. It creates such a time, and by that, ironically, a "world outside time". This should be obvious, as all layers of psychological phenomena exist in a timeless sphere.
The beneficial contributions that trauma makes to our humaneness, by creating an individual sphere of timelessness, also, by connecting traumatizer and traumatised with a unique language, and thus: communication only they can understand, these traits of Omertà are rarely seen.
But they are necessary and important.
Omertà preserves trauma as it is trauma. We couldn't live without.
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