SURVIVING TRAUMA

The evidence he refers to is a study in the Psychological Bulletin of long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse that concluded that, in the large majority of cases, unless it was extreme, very frequent, or accompanied by physical abuse or prolonged neglect, the long-term effect was so small as to be barely statistically significant. The report was so offensive to so many that Congress was pressured to repudiate it, and did.

My readers know I don’t place much stock in psychology, and that I prefer explanations for behaviour that are rooted in real science, or at least Darwinian principles: Actions and behaviours that increase a species’ capability to survive will be selected for, i.e. a propensity to exhibit such actions and behaviours will become more and more prevalent in the population.

I’ve argued before that depression in today’s world may be natural. I’ve also argued that when we are unhappy or grief-stricken we create stories that provide us with solace, so that our vivid imaginings can become so real that they become alternatives out of time, even to the point where ‘what might have been’ becomes to us a regrettable real possibility in the present. This prevents us from seeing this alternative reality as false, achieving closure, and moving on with our lives.

We are all living our own stories, and there is no way to see them objectively as real or unreal, true or imaginary. To us, they are absolutely true. When we suffer trauma, we may put it behind us, wrap up that chapter in our story, or we may not. When that trauma is compound — a physical and sexual and mental trauma, or one that combines actions (like abuse) and inaction to address it (like neglect or passive complicity by others), or one that is chronic or frequent, there is little doubt that it is harder to get past. In nature, a fight or flight instinct kicks in when danger threatens. Most animals in nature face death and witness death often in their lives. They escape, perhaps watching as a mate or community member or child is eaten by a predator. In any case the event is traumatic — adrenaline surges, the body goes into overdrive, some shocking event occurs or doesn’t, and the survivors are left to deal with the result. If the response of a species were to grieve for years over the loss, or over a decision error that may have cost a loved one their life, the species would not survive — it would be incapacitated. In a balanced ecosystem, these traumatic events are regular but not chronic — most species spend most of their time in the joyous activities of eating, exploring, mating, playing, sleeping, and sensing the world around them. Their failure to grieve, at least for long, is in my opinion due not to their small brains but to the fact that there is too much joy and wonder in the world to waste much time grieving over what happened or might have happened. It’s Darwinian — it happens that way because it works, it optimizes the healthy survival of the species.

As Jeffrey Masson has shown, animals with larger brains tend to grieve longer, and return to their grief over a longer period, probably because they have better memories that are triggered by sensations that remind the creature of the traumatic event. Elephants weep each time they return to the site where a loved one lost their life, for their entire lives. That is natural, but not debilitating. The grief, the trauma, does not consume them to the point where they are incapacitated by it. Only humans kill for revenge. Only humans kill large numbers of their own. Such behaviour is, on the surface, anti-Darwinian — it hurts the species rather than helping it to survive and perpetuate it. Misery is anti-Darwinian — those that live in physical or emotional misery tend to withdraw from social activities, fail to defend themselves from predators, die young from stress-related activities, and, if they’re female, become infertile. This is nature’s extreme-stress safety valve. Such misery is the consequence of over-crowding, too many competing for too few resources. As Edward Hall explains, in such circumstances (very rare before the advent of civilization) adrenaline is used to quickly thin the crowd and restore the balance with the rest of the ecosystem.

The world we live in today is horrendously overcrowded, insanely out of balance with the rest of the ecosystem, and our evolved intelligence is allowing us, at least physically for a short time, to offset all of nature’s attempts to reduce our numbers to sustainable levels. Nature evolves new diseases that exploit crowded concentrations of one species, we reply by inventing antibiotics and antiviruses. Nature drives up our levels of adrenaline to levels that provoke war, anti-social behaviour, massive depression, and we reply with technologies that sedate us or cheer us up, that imprison those who can least suppress their violent urges, and which refocus our adrenaline on activities that do not kill.

But nature always bats last in this competition of wills. I would argue that we all live, now, in a state of continuous agitation and constant anxiety, massive stress that has resulted in us all becoming mentally ill. Our whole lives are an incessant trauma — work stress, competitive stress, stress to have ‘enough stuff’, stress to be accepted by others. Our desire to find a way to try to sustain a society that is so obviously unsustainable, and to deny the damage we are doing, to ignore the massive misery that prevails in our world, to believe against overwhelming evidence that we can somehow innovate ourselves out of the horrendous mess we have created, is evidence of utter, adrenaline-crazed insanity. We are only happy in those brief delusional moments when the awareness of the utter horror that civilization has wrought is temporarily suppressed — by constant education of denial of that reality, by drugs, by sexual distraction, by media that suppress the truth, by hiding the worst atrocities behind closed doors and walls where we can try to pretend they aren’t happening.

Today, we are all struggling to survive a life-long trauma, and it is interesting to me that in the last half-century our literature and our political leaders have become much more pessimistic about our ability to do so. It is almost as if, by proclaiming that most victims of post-traumatic stress disorder and childhood sexual abuse cannot be expected to get over those traumas without enormous help and intervention from our society, we are saying to ourselves three things:

• We instinctively know the world is a mess, and we need someone to blame to avoid taking personal responsibility for it: Sexual predators and abusers and those who commit violent crimes and war criminals and those who neglect children are convenient scapegoats. Obviously they are guilty, so why not exaggerate their impact so we can offload all our personal guilt onto them?
• We feel better about ourselves when we see others in even worse circumstances than ours, especially when their circumstances aren’t our fault. So let’s make these victims of personal crimes super-victims, so we can feel especially sorry for them.
• If there is a process that can help these people overcome their trauma, their grief, then perhaps it can work to make us all feel better, make all the mess that weighs so heavily on all our spirits go away.

This is tricky ground, but I think there is a lot of mass psychopathy going on here. Alternative explanations welcome, as always.

The photo above aired as the focus of a commercial for Bush in the last few days of the election campaign. I think it is brilliant, an absolute coup against all the negative advertising that dominated the campaign. It was actually taken by the girl’s father at a Bush rally. The girl’s mother was one of the victims of 9/11, killed in the attack on the twin towers. The girl is a survivor of trauma, and the impulsive hug from Bush on learning of her story is captured in the photo. It’s the only time I have seen Bush without a mask.