WHY PEOPLE AROUND YOU RESIST YOUR SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING

In the words of Dr. Robert Block, the former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics

Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation [USA] today. And for a lot of people, that's a terrifying prospect.

Why Trauma Feels Like a Terrifying Prospect

"A terrifying prospect"! as if our collective discovery of being hurt were comparable to a mythical predatory fire-blowing dragon! What is ahead of us in seeking back our lost memories is an opportunity that most of us are misinterpreting as a "terrifying prospect", a difference that is neither small nor elusive, and one many professionals denounce:

Because most of our societies still stigmatise PTSD symptoms, defining the traumatising events as normal, and the traumatized individual as overacting or overly sensitive, admitting to a trauma and its symptoms takes a tremendous amount of courage (Dr. Blanco-Oilar)

While we see misbehaviour as caused by a defect in the individual's psychology, the reality is that the individual carries the collective burden with him or her. Traumas, particularly soft traumas, are symptoms of our collective wound and ignorance, and those of us who get traumatized today, do so because those who have preceded us were traumatized and ignored to be so (Dr. Ross)

If we lived in a society where equity, respect, access, and justice were realized, and unearned privilege and inequality and oppression were transformed, the impact of trauma exposure in our lives would look dramatically different. Suffering would still occur. People would sustain injuries and contract illnesses and even hurt each other. The difference is that we would only have to confront that suffering at face value: an injury, an illness, a hurtful act (and Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, author of "Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others")

The Role of Social Bias in Stigmatizing Trauma

What these voices point to is a bias in our social attitudes, a bias oriented towards stigma, blame, aggression and an irrationally individualistic view of a process that is much better understood as collective.

Through this bias we are conditioned

1) to feel fear when meeting the uncertainty that comes with knowing our pain; 

2) to react aggressively towards the sadness and hurt our bodies feel and hold. 

3) and to make ourselves feel overly responsible for things we could barely influence. 

And yet, why should we react aggressively and not with compassion towards not only the hurt we felt during the traumatizing events, but also the loneliness we endured all this while? After all, as old myths teach us:

if there’s a crisis in the story, the remedy for the crisis always comes from the edge, not the center... A mythological move is to be aware of all the hundred trembling secrets at the edge of your vision. Because they are the things that want to secrete their intelligence into you about the problem that’s right in front of you (Martin Shaw Interview extract from Mud and Antler Bone)

Reframing the Search for Understanding as Courage

But as head of one of America’s leading skeptic organizations Michael Shermer points out, because environments and individuals interact in evolutionary self-reinforcing ways, attitudes that evolutionary speaking have given us a stronger advantage in the wild, still dominate our broader attitudes:

I call this process "patternicity", the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless signals. When we do this we make two types of errors. One is believing a pattern is real when it's not, and a second is not believing a pattern is real when it is. Assessing the difference between the first and the second possible error is highly problematic, especially in split-second life-and-death situations, so I think that evolutionary there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of PREDATORY and INTENTIONAL agencies. This is a pattern detection problem.

Trauma wounds are inter-generational patterns, and if our default belief is that patterns are embued with predatory and intentional agency, a "pattern detection problem" that is even more amplified in individuals with traumatic experiences, then looking into trauma wounds is like looking straight into the eyes of a tiger behind a bush, an attitude left to those few who have the capacity for hunting in the dark for the most mysterious and elusive of creatures.

Don't be surprised if your willingness to know your trauma finds resistance then. Rather, reframe your interest in understanding the patterns of hurt that have long preceded you, as the rare curiosity and courage of a man or a woman capable of exploring the most desolate of landscapes, in search of the most elusive mysteries. You are acting in the wisdom of the old myths, but also finding a naturally evolved  resistance to look in the eyes of the tiger.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko