what is trauma
a trauma is not merely a terrible event
though it is very much that too
it is a terrible event that has not been
adequately processed understood and
unpicked
and that has through neglect being able
to cast a very long
and undeserved shadow over huge areas of
experience
the concept of trauma was first observed
in military contexts
let us imagine that in bed one night in
a country torn apart by civil war
we hear a car alarm followed a few
seconds later by a huge explosion
our neighborhood is destroyed and
several members of our family are killed
we are devastated but under pressure to
continue with our lives
are unable to reflect adequately or
properly to mourn what has happened
we are forced to move on from a dreadful
experience with fateful haste
and a lack of emotional assimilation
and yet the unattended memory of
bloodshed chaos and loss
doesn't disappear instead it curdles
into an unknown
interior presence we call trauma which
means that in the years and decades
ahead
even in the most peaceful circumstances
whenever we hear a car alarm
or indeed any high-pitched sound that of
an elevator's ping for example
we are mysteriously for reasons we don't
really understand
thrown back into our original panic as
if a thousand tons of tnt were about to
explode once again
however appalling this can be
psychologists have learnt that trauma
can as easily be acquired in ostensibly
peaceful circumstances
we don't need to have been through a war
to be traumatized in multiple ways
imagine a six-year-old child who makes
an error in a maths exam and takes the
news home
suddenly her father who drinks too much
and might be battling depression and
paranoia
flies into a rage shouts at her smashes
a household object and slams multiple
doors
from the perspective of a six-year-old
it feels like the world is ending
there is no way to make sense of the
moment beyond taking responsibility for
it
and as a result feeling like a terrible
human being
and from this a trauma develops this one
centered around making mistakes
every slip up on this person's part
threatens to unleash an explosion in
others
far into adulthood every time there is a
risk of an error
there is a terror that someone else will
get dementedly furious
everyone becomes terrifying because one
person in particular who was spine
chilling
hasn't been thought about and reckoned
with in memory
the solution in all such cases is to get
a better sense of the specific incidents
in the past
that have generated difficulties in
order to unhook the mind from its
expectations
the clue that we are dealing with a
trauma rather than any sort of justified
fear
lies in the scale and intensity of
feelings that descend in conditions when
there is no objective rationale for them
it's peace time a colleague is kind and
yet still there is terror
still there is self-disgust still there
is shame
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we know then that we are not dealing
with silliness or madness
or indeed genuine danger but with an
unprocessed
incident from the past casting a
debilitating shadow on a more innocent
present
as traumatized people the memory of the
founding incident is within us
but our conscious mind swerve away from
the possibility of engaging with it
and neutralizing it through rational
examination
when we can finally feel comfortable and
safe enough to dare look back
we'll be able to see the traumatizing
moment for what it was
outside of our original panic and our
youthful or illogical conclusions
that it was our fault that we did
something wrong that we are sinful
liberating ourselves will mean
understanding the specific
local and relatively unique features of
what has traumatized us
and then growing aware of how our minds
have multiplied and universalized the
difficulty
in part to protect us from an encounter
which was once too difficult to grapple
with
we will realize that it was one bomb
that exploded and destroyed the
neighborhood
and that however dreadful this might
have been there is no reason for all
high-pitched noises to terrify us
similarly it was one father who screamed
at us for making a mistake when we were
tiny
yet not everyone who is in authority
threatens to annihilate us in adulthood
countless situations will be frightening
so long as individual incidents have not
been
understood and thought through with
kindness and imagination
by properly gripping an original event
in the claws of our rational adult mind
and stripping it of its mystery we will
be able to repatriate
fearful emotions and render the world
less unnerving than it presently seems
life as a whole won't have to be so
terrifying once we understand the bits
of it that truly once were
how to overcome your childhood is a book
that teaches us how character is
developed
the concept of emotional inheritance the
formation of our concepts of being good
or bad
and the impact of parental styles of
love on the way we choose adult partners