As I keep pointing out, there are seemingly two stages to emotionally or physically violent or dangerous situations: 1) fight/flight/shame; and 2) dissociation and depersonalization. The limbic system, then the Reptilian Brain, or so I recall it neurologically.
In terms of emotional health, it seems to me this is a descending order. The healthiest response is to fight. People who muster up a fight response in a bad situation are often able to avoid trauma altogether, and almost certainly if their fight succeeds in deflecting or even defeating the attack, socially or physically.
As I understand it, most soldiers do not get PTSD from their actual battles, when they are shooting and being shot at, at least not in the short run. They get PTSD from things like being shelled–where they just have to wait helplessly–and ambushed–where they lose the control of initiative–and no small number of them from guilt at killing, which is most likely mainly shame. I think fear is cumulative, but I think anyone who goes outside wire every time feeling empowered and ready and willing to fight, does not get PTSD, even if they see and do some awful shit.
As B.G. Burkett pointed out in his essential book “Stolen Valor”, most actual combat veterans from the Vietnam War did NOT have PTSD, and in fact most of them were proportionally vastly more successful in “Life”, writ large, than people who did not serve, or who did not see combat. Their experiences emboldened them, and toughened them, and those traits tend to make people vastly more effectively at everything. They fear less. They dare more.
Here is my point: I think much cruelty is an effort to take back a victory which was lost long long ago. When you are a child, and you are subjected to violence of any sort that you cannot avoid, it is traumatizing. Helplessness and trauma go together.
Peter Levine’s oeuvre really began, as I understand the story, and I’ve watched him tell it on YouTube, when a client with long term physical complaints–I forget the details, but it was likely things like headaches, and various ailments with no obvious cause, and obviously all backed by nearly continuous anxiety–suddenly “ran” in a therapy session. Her legs started twitching violently, like she was running. This “flight”, a long term suppressed neurological response, seemed to help her.
And his life’s work is based on that, what he calls Somatic Experiencing.
What I will suggest, though, is that while running is useful, fighting is even more useful.
I think in important respects our entire culture traumatizes us. I speak here of the dominant white culture in most of North America and Europe, but I think Japan could easily be added to this, and of course Communism is little BUT trauma, so add China.
Maybe ALL “culture” is to some extent traumatizing. I think of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Maybe all of us are, to some extent, square pegs pounded into round holes, even when FREEDOM!!! is the catchword of the land.
Freedom for what? To what? Yes, to express ourselves, and do what we feel, but do we also not all have a thirst for belonging? The freedom to belong, to be accepted? Is there not always some price to be paid for this?
I wonder if a notion of a Transcendent Order of some sort is not always necessary to sort out this contradiction. Freedom as choosing to accept a place in something larger. Unfreedom as not being free to choose what order you belong to, and how.
If you look at the history of the United States, “freedom” by and large meant religious freedom, freedom to worship God in your own way. It was always freedom within the larger order, combined with clear expectations with respect to your “tribe”, your religious group, your “people”. The goal was not freedom from responsibility, from self regulation, from a clear dedication to the common good.
Government, in America, was to protect your freedom to pursue what in some respects might be seen as your own “restraint”. Religio-, I will remind you, is Latin for “to bind”. Your government did not tell you what to do, but your peers did.
And Eudaemonia–on all accounts I read what he meant by “pursuit of happiness”–definitely plays into this. Jefferson was brilliant for including this, which expanded on Locke’s Life, Liberty and Property.
It is both beautiful and maddening. To my mind, the only basis for a society which both promotes the elevation of the individual soul, and is stable and peaceful and yes, ideally transcendent, is a general commitment to personal growth, to balance, to continual negotiation in emotionally intelligent terms with everyone else. To waves and patterns of color, in continual movement, to a dance which goes we know not where, but which, if filled with honest and sincere people, will become progressively more beautiful.
These are interesting thoughts, which are a digression from the initial point I started to make. I never hesitate to explore side paths when they present themselves.
What I started to say was that completing the “fight” arc is likely the true foundation of sacrifice. Of ritual violence. And ritual violence is likely the result of social violence, of hierarchy, of shame made into an institution used for control. And the irony is that the people at the top are trauma based too. They disempower others to deal with their own shame and the whole edifice rests on ritual violence to dispel the tension which arises again and again in an unhealthy and unnatural forced social order.
The power elite on this planet, which I continue to believe must be guiding the events of today, are the most shame filled people on the planet. It has seemed clear to me for some time that the very, very rich raise kids who are filled with terror and expectations. All of this plays out in their lives. Most of them no doubt want a return to something like a Caste system, where people are shoved into slots and violent things happen to them if they rebel.
As I have mentioned before–but it has been some years now–I wanted to write a paper in Grad School at Chicago on the apparent similarities between what I was going to argue was the ritual cycle serial killers go through, and the cycle of larger scale human sacrifice.
One book I read talked about human sacrifice in Hawaii. Liminal people–women, children, people captured from other tribes in war–would be bound and ritually clubbed in the head, in a manner not that different from that portrayed in the beginning of the first Guardians of the Galaxy.
We have a cultural fascination with serial killers, do we not? Do not most Americans look at them with the same horror and fascination we look at terrible car accidents? There seems to be something there, but we don’t know what. It is primal, awful, but enticing and almost intoxicating.
And is there any real difference between a Hawaiian “priest” ritually bashing someone’s brains out, for general observation and contemplation and vicarious participation, and what serial killers do? Are they different in principle or motivation? Are not both intended to alleviate and manage latent and unconscious and unbearable individual and social conflicts?
Read the summary of this movie, You’re Next.
Just reading it makes my skin crawl a bit. It’s all just pointless death and horror, by which of course I mean the POINT of horror movies is the FEELING of horror.
Why would anyone watch this? What I want to argue is that seeing that death and murder alleviates tension and anxiety. It is a society level response to pervasive feelings of shame and lack of inclusion. It completes the “fight” response, vicariously, just as all ritual–really, ritual could be equated with “theatrical” or dramatic, couldn’t it?–is intended to do.
It is perhaps to be expected that elites, looking at all this, would see the solution to the human future as needing to be rooted in violence, but final violence, Endloesung level violence, after which everyone has a place that does not change, and which is not subject to negotiation.
There are many valid reasons to see our future with terror. I get this, obviously.
But my work, which is in fact rooted in hope, if not in this life, then in the next (and the evidence is overwhelming scientifically that life, consciousness, goes on) that these problems can be solved.
It may be true that these problems cannot be solved without reference to, without the inclusion of, an immanent Universal, a God, a Great Spirit, an embodiment of approximate Goodness, but science itself posits such a thing. You cannot solve the equations for quantum collapse without reference to consciousness, and that anything seems to exist at all seems to require a First Consciousness, which we may as well call God, even if we deduct all the culturally specific claims made about this God. As I understand it, this was John von Neumann’s conclusion, and he was a very clever man.
Or as Heisenberg put it: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
And I recall now I have quoted from this page before, but will do so again:
Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we should have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life, I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.
As regards God, Heisenberg refers to “a central order whose existence seems beyond doubt, who can be reached as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being.
After these conversations with Tagore, some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.
Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Where does this leave us?
Here is what I will assert: our task, as Humanity writ large, is to learn SCIENTIFICALLY all we can about God and the survival of consciousness, and develop NEW FORMS OF RELIGION, forms which correct for all the abusive power structures, and inherent cruelty and injustice, and all of the many errors all religions fell into to some degree or other, while still retaining the much that was good and true in all of them.
This is my reasoning. These are my conclusions.