Trauma Stunts Us
How we're trapped in a situation where injury proceeds directly to trauma.
Injury is inevitable. Why is it that for us humans, and all life under our influence, injury inevitably leads to trauma?
Life has flourished on this Earth for half a billion years. Life includes the certainty that living creatures will be injured. Life flourished despite the necessity for injury. Yet now, we find ourselves in circumstances where injury almost inevitably leads to something other than death or a second chance. Our injuries result in trauma.
In Emergency Medicine the terms injury and trauma appear to be interchangeable. I’m referring to the psychological and even spiritual consequences of injury that are referred to as traumatic. A mechanism through which injury results in mental/emotional scarring. As with any scarring, this is the organism’s attempt to heal from injury. What happens when an injury does not heal rapidly or well is that the scar ends up being thick and inelastic. It does cover over the injury but does not return the creature to its normal, healthy condition. It is, as we say, forever scarred….
I’ve always had an intuition that this was not always the case. Either for humans, or anyone. Life cannot flourish if every injury turns into a debilitating scar. And, for most of that half a billion years life has undeniably flourished. Today it is not flourishing. Dysfunction rules.
This latter, and vitally significant piece of the puzzle, was not immediately obvious during the Twentieth Century, as amazing as this realization might seem today. Just look at the depth of denial we still suffer under. The extent of what was unfolding all around us, say in the 1960s or ‘70s, was just too great an Enormity to be taken in. The industry of plausible deniability was too good at what it does and our naiveté too fresh and unchallenged to put up much of a resistance.
Today we have a single advantage over those who came before. The damage done, the ways in which these damages have been inflicted, and, perhaps most importantly, the scope of what is at stake; these things are now abundantly clear to anyone who can make even a cursory examination of what lies behind our societal denial.
Our strengths are tied to our troubles. We grow and change because of the ways we have been hurt. And in this we have an inkling of a way beyond this cycle of trauma and debilitation….
There is a direct connection between the way childhood trauma blocks our development into integrated adulthood and the fact that we can no longer deal with injury without succumbing to being traumatized. This generates a vicious cycle as stunted adults inflict traumatizing injuries on children who then grow up to repeat and deepen the cycle of what we call abuse. At a certain critical point, which we humans may have crossed thousands of years ago, this cycle of dysfunction took over and inevitably lead to the hobbling of Life in all its forms we now suffer under.
How does trauma lead to infantilization? Today it is hard to ignore the way infantilization has been weaponized as a means of control over populations. We can see the way those in power; or as I prefer to characterize it, those under the thrall of the fable of power, those who believe, as a result of having achieved some short-lived advantage in what they see as the competition of life, life seen as nothing more than a struggle over who will dominate and who will succumb to that domination; use infantilization as a means to their ends. But this still leaves the question of why we are susceptible to this form of domination unexamined.
When we are traumatized as young children. And by traumatized I mean that inevitable injury is not given an opportunity, or a way, to heal normally. We react by attempting to control the situation ourselves. This dysfunctional expectation that control is an “answer,” that one can control circumstances in any meaningful way, is excusable when it occurs to a damaged child. After all, they have not developed sufficient maturity to realize how much of a fantasy controlling turns out to be!
Why is it so difficult for us, nominally adult people to understand this basic fact of life? Because the forcing of adult responsibilities onto immature children locks us into believing that the roles we managed to cobble together in these futile attempts to deal with our own childhood trauma makes up “who we are.” These notions become what we feel the embodiment of adulthood “should be.” We spend our lives struggling to make sense out of deeply incoherent notions that came to dominate us before we had any opportunity to know any better.
Take some time and sit with a “first contact” photograph of an indigenous person. We are struck by their unmistakable presence. A weight, coupled with a lightness of being. Now look at any photo of a modern American….
The point here is to practice a kind of looking that is not defensive the way we have been conditioned to be about anything that might challenge our prejudices and habitual ways of seeing. As creatures we have so many abilities, capacities, that for us modern, infantilized humans, lay, at best, dormant within us. Look to see if we can recognize something that touches us. Get in the habit of listening to our intuitions and so we may use them as guides in making working assessments, instead of automatically jumping into snap judgements, about those we might interact with, relate to. Enter into relationship with.
I’m suggesting that we will find a profound difference between the people we see looking back at us in these examples. Somewhere we may find a way to recognize a form of adulthood that is vital as well as being able to recognize forms of adulthood that are stunted and dysfunctional. We can also look at our own image, either in a photograph or in the mirror. Who is that? Can we feel where they are in their development/blockage? Not to judge them. Not to devalue anyone, but simply to see where they/we stand?
So much of what ails us comes down to this mechanism having taken over from the kind of vitality we see any time we look upon any living thing. Why are we so often undead and not alive? How do we stand for the destruction of everything being done in our name?
We do so because we have been trapped in incoherence by notions of what it is to be human that we first adopted as reactions to traumatic injuries we suffered as children. Injuries inherited from stunted parents who inherited this condition from their stunted parents….
Our defensive habits will intrude. We’ll hear an internal critic scorning such notions, grasping at fragments of glossed-over and misremembered intellectual positions, “That’s just a Romantic notion!” “There never was a Noble Savage!” “Life is hard! Get over it snowflake!”
How do these fragmentary thoughts rule us? To begin, they do so by acting automatically. We are so habituated to a defensive posture. We feel threatened to our core when anything seems to shake our certainties. We have bound our sense of self so thoroughly to roles. We scarcely remember how they arose and we don’t even notice how ridiculous the entire notion of a defended, defensive self is. We just react. We feel bad doing so, a vestige of our inner vitality, but we then blame whatever shook our unearned equanimity for our discomfort instead of recognizing the way we cannot completely suppress how horrible it is to be trapped in our bound condition.
The pressure of not dealing with our unconfronted trauma fuels our defensiveness. Defensiveness blocks our ability to confront our trauma. The double-binds spiral from this center and take over our lives.