Acting Out our Collective Trauma

a card from the Group Works deck, with a bit of my own editing

Those of you who have been following me for a while, or who know me personally, know that I’m generally at least as concerned about why things are happening, as I am about the facts of what is happening.

When it comes to events as momentous and complex as wars, it is of course impossible to actually know all the facts, but by looking at the history and context behind these events, we can at least offer some conjectures about why they are happening. So what I am writing here is simply that: my conjecture about why the atrocities unfolding across the globe these days, have been and are being committed.

I do not claim to be particularly knowledgeable about human behaviour; my discoveries about human nature and human culture are all the result of armchair research, and resultant conversations, based on a deep curiosity for what makes our species tick, and in particular how we differ in our ‘psychological makeup’ from other animals.

As a result of that curiosity, I have read and studied a fair bit on the subject of trauma, although certainly not enough to claim any expertise on the subject. But when you read enough about how trauma is passed down from generation to generation, how easy it is to be triggered and reinforced, and how horrendously difficult it is to move past it, you start to get an idea of how seemingly rational humans can begin to behave, individually and collectively, in insanely irrational ways.

I have read, as much as I can bear, about the subjugation and mistreatment of Palestinians, particularly since 1948, but even before that. I have read, as much as I can bear, about the horrific crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jewish people during WWII, and also their persecution before and since then. It doesn’t take much to realize that both groups have assuredly been profoundly traumatized as a result of these crimes.

What happens to people who are traumatized? They may become sensitive and easily triggered. They might try to desensitize themselves in case it recurs. They may vow to do whatever it takes to prevent it happening again. They may even become traumatizers and bullies themselves, as a fraught way of coping.

This trauma may be personal, or it may be collective. And of course those suffering from personal trauma may well inflict suffering on whole groups of people, and the sufferers of collective trauma may reinforce that trauma in each other, and inflict additional suffering on individuals ‘outside’ the group.

The result, it would seem, is what we now see in Palestine and Israel. And, though I’m less sure about this, perhaps this acting out of trauma is what we’re seeing in Ukraine and Russia, and in most of the countries in the world beset by seemingly endless sectarian violence and oppression. Although the west has attempted to rewrite the history, it was the Russians who were mostly responsible for the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, not the British or the Americans. And of all nations it was the Russians who paid the greatest price in that war — 27 million people killed, of which 19 million were civilians. A quarter of the entire Soviet population was killed or wounded in the war. If that isn’t enough to traumatize a nation’s citizens to the point they get triggered by any signs of Naziism on their doorstep, I can’t imagine what is.

You can sense the residue of this kind of trauma in the animosity that still exists in Ireland, and even in the anger in the former Confederate States of America. I suspect it was also rife among the humiliated people of the Weimar Republic between the two world wars.

This is not to excuse any of these behaviours. An atrocity is an atrocity, and a genocide a genocide. There is no excuse for it, no defending it. But things don’t happen for no reason, and that reason is almost never, as I have repeatedly argued, insanity, evil, or even simple greed. It is almost always, I think, an acting out of trauma.

Look at most of the people locked up in prisons, most of the people wasting away in city streets, and those bullying other kids on the playground, abusing family members, and joining gangs, and you will, I think, see the same pattern. Look at the people, including current and past presidents and senior officials, rejoicing gleefully in the violent overthrow, torture and abuse of declared “enemies”, and you are, I would suggest, watching the acting out of suffered trauma.

The biggest question I have pondered over the years is: Can we ever really get over trauma? Or is it something that will always consume us, and something that we will inevitably pass down, most likely unintentionally, to future generations, keeping the hate and fear alive?

My tentative conclusion is that in most cases we probably don’t ever get over it, especially when it is re-triggered by subsequent or recurrent events, conversations, media reports, and other stressors in our lives. We have long memories, and all the new media help keep them alive. And there is disturbing evidence that we carry trauma in our bodies and pass it down to future generations, so even if we don’t speak about our trauma to our children, it can infect them nevertheless.

Of course, we don’t want to hear this. It’s a hopeless prognosis. Not only are we all conditioned by our culture to think and act alike, even when those thoughts and actions (and reactions) are cruel, brutal, destructive, and inevitably make the situation worse, we are likewise conditioned by our bodies to carry and to act out the trauma of our ancestors.

This is part of the reason I am so pessimistic about our capacity to handle the accelerating ecological, economic, political and social collapse over the coming decades. It’s long been known that ‘stress kills’, but the lingering effect of stress manifested in trauma might actually ‘kill’ even more than the immediate stress of the moment does. I have argued before that the stressors of our civilization have made us all to some degree mentally ill, and I think this trauma is a significant component of that.

And this, I think, might be the upshot of the unique development of the human brain, with its long memory, and its capacity and proclivity to attach cause and meaning and intention to things that happen. That’s not to say other creatures can’t be traumatized, but my sense is that because they don’t ascribe it to malice or deliberate intent, other animals don’t ‘carry’ trauma as long or as deeply as humans do. In that sense, our brain’s evolution might be a terrible maladaptation, an evolutionary misstep that we, and our world, would have been better to have avoided.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are. As I said in my next-to-last post, this is likely only to get worse. Knowing what might be behind it, and that after all we are really doing our best, and that we are by nature a biophilial species, and that our acting out of our personal and collective trauma in horrific ways is not a reflection of our inherent nature, is small solace.

But isn’t it better to know anyway? To give the billions of humans who have no choice but to act out their conditioning, as Everything Falls Apart, the benefit of the doubt? Not to condone or excuse, but just to understand.

Thanks to Kelly Gavin for helping me think through this article, though its ideas and conclusions are my own. Kelly points out that there are some programs that have demonstrably helped individuals, including those from oppressed and vulnerable groups, to heal from trauma. I am pessimistic that such programs can ever hope to make more than a small dent in the terrible accumulated toll of personal and collective trauma being acted out in the world today.