I have of course written about all of this quite a bit. The point I would make is that the question is not just “what happened to that child”. I’m not even convinced that is the most important question. The better question is “what did NOT happen to that child?” What affection was withheld or absent throughout the child’s life? What moral clarity was absent? What early nurturing did not happen?
What we call PTSD is what, in my understanding, the professionals now call “Simple Trauma”. It is simple because it stems from a series of events, or even a single event which, as horrific as it was, was time delimited, and known to the survivor. Car accidents, medical emergencies, combat: these can all produce PTSD.
What in my own terms I will also call Complex Trauma, but which I might be defining in my own way (I have been diagnosed with it, so I do have some insight), consists in my view in traumas both of presence and absence. Bad things happened, at an age when the brain was still developing, but the resources to deal with them were also absent. Most kids, I suspect, endure multiple things in an average childhood which COULD, but don’t, produce traumatic after-shocks. This is because in a loving, nurturing, emotionally aware environment, they are given the space and sense of safety to develop inner resources to deal with “bad” things.
Overall, though, and even though she does not say it directly here, and I very much doubt she has the courage (she is not actually, in my view, a genuinely brave woman, but one who has always had an instinct for what people want to hear, and a talent for making everyone feel special) to say it in the interview, which I don’t plan to watch, but in my own estimation traumatic stress is the principle factor “holding” the black community down.
We know that stress can be passed from parent to child epigenetically. as well as, of course, through the personality structures doing the parenting. This was shown with regard to survivors of the Holocaust and their children. And we know that, at least since roughly 1970, the average child in a black neighborhood has existed in a world largely denuded of healthy, nurturing two parent homes, has grown up in a world filled with violence and poverty, and has been faced with a schooling which was utterly inadequate to the task of preparing them for most jobs. That such a system should be self perpetuating should surprise no one. That throwing money at it is not the solution should be obvious.
What if we offered no or low cost Neurofeedback to all low income children whose parents wanted it? What if we offered it to the kids who misbehave and act out? What if we offered it to JAIL INMATES, most of whom, I strongly suspect, have been REPEATEDLY traumatized, not least by the prison system itself.
What if we state unambiguously that there is such a thing as sound emotional health, that it matters in all areas of life, including economically, and that supporting and increasing it should be a national priority? What if we stop saying racism is the problem, and start saying that fucked up kids from fucked up homes are the problem, and that it is not a moral question, but a practical one, one amenable to solutions more effective than continued pontification, bloviation, objuscation, and predation being practiced by the purported allies of those suffering distress?
So many people, whose lives depend on this status quo, would hate the idea.
But, and this thinking underlies my work, the bastards don’t always win. Sometimes the good guys and gals do. Look at the world as it is. But what it is is always also something possible, waiting to be born. The first step on the path of the possible, if it is in fact possible, already exists.