One
of the most frequently used terms today in connection with the long-term
effects of war on people is post-traumatic stress disorder. The essence of this concept is that long
after a person experiences an explosive disruptive event that does immediate physical
and psychological damage, there are lingering psychological effects, some of
which don’t become apparent until years after the explosive disruptive
event. The event is so disruptive and so
overwhelming, that the person who experiences it is unable to process it
effectively, and unable to somehow absorb it and integrate it in his mind. In modern times, we have created extremely
destructive weapons and, at the same time, increasingly amazing methods of
keeping people alive from the destruction that they experience. People survive being maimed and crippled and
shocked from these weapons, and their memories of what caused these horrendous destructive
experiences survive as well. The obvious
cause of the PTSD is the overstimulating tension-pocket armaments that created
these destructive effects. But I would
like to submit there is another more subtle level of causation working
here. And this is the experiential
vacuum within which modern warfare frequently occurs.
It is
not like the days when a person could see who was attacking him much of the
time. There are no sword fights or gun
duels or opposing armies on a battlefield.
Instead we are talking much more about warfare from mediation and
surprise. Snipers, bombings from
airplanes and missiles, land mines, suicide bombings. There is little opportunity to steel oneself
against such attacks. A person today
frequently does not see his enemy up close, and the enemy frequently does not
see him up close. And the suicide bomber
does not see many of the people he kills.
Modern weapons are very anonymous and very alienating. They knock us around experientially our
modern vacuum battlefield. They create
experiential tension-pockets that can shock us, overstimulate us, even when
there are no actual immediate physical injuries. And this psychological shock
is made so much worse as a result of the cold, impersonal, mediated backdrop of
modern technological warfare in which they occur. And it is so easy to pull triggers and press
buttons to set projectiles in motion, so totally frictionless.
These
elements of emptiness and surprise make it much more difficult for a war victim
to process, absorb and integrate what has happened to him. The person relives what has happened to him
over and over again. He may be able to
suppress it for a while. But even then,
it may begin to affect him in negative ways of which he is not fully conscious.
Trauma
is not a condition exclusively connected to war. Freud wrote about the emotionally traumatic
events that affected people when they were children. These traumatic events were emotionally
repressed and as a result, created many psychological symptoms. People were not able to process, absorb and
integrate these events into their psyches because they were so sharply painful,
but the events continued to stimulate them in the form of these symptoms. And
the symptoms impaired the people’s quality of life, prevented the people from
living fully happy and productive lives.
It was the purpose of psychoanalysis to help a person to explore his
unconscious mind through free association and dream analysis in order to bring
those traumas to the surface of consciousness.
There they could be properly processed, absorbed and integrated by the person
in such a way that they no longer would control his life so much.
The
notion of trauma is certainly an important component in understanding mental
illness. But so is the notion of a
vacuum. Many emotional problems result from a person’s lack of connection to
emotionally remote parents rather than from tension-pocket abuse. And furthermore both tension-pocket traumas
and a vacuum lack of emotional connection can be reinforced, amplified as a
result of the sensory distortion from a modern technological, vacuum and
tension-pocket, living environment. The
lack of organic grounding in such an environment means there is not an external
world configuration of stimuli that can create a template to help people to
heal their antagonisms and their causes of feeling emotionally apart. In our vacuum living environment, everything
gets exaggerated.
But
it is important to realize that psychotherapies developed to heal emotional
problems, whether PTSD or traditional neuroses or personality disorders, very
likely won’t be totally successful without taking into consideration the
effects of highly vacuumized living environments. A grounded living environment can be so
helpful in allowing a person to absorb a disruptive overwhelming event. Many years ago, I read an anthropological
study on the Tahitians, a Polynesian group from the South Pacific. What impressed me most was an observation by
the anthropologist of a boy who had climbed a tree, probably to pick coconuts,
and fallen off it and broken his arm.
The boy’s reaction was to calmly pick up his broken arm with his good
arm and go back to his village to have the arm taken care of. No crying, no fuss, no shock for something
that might have been a traumatic event for a boy in Western society. It was indicated that a Tahitian boy would
have been far more troubled by a situation where he experience a loss of social
approval, a loss of emotional organic grounding. But at least the Tahitian boy had the organic
grounding of a natural environment and a more coherent social community to
worry about losing. This doesn’t mean
that there aren’t problems of organic perishability in a tropical
paradise. What about typhoons? And strong social grounding in traditional
societies can bring threats of being enveloped by sorcery and witchcraft. But natural grounding and social grounding
can also help to create the kind of internal emotional grounding that help to
prevent disruptive and explosive events from resonating in a person’s mind.
At
exactly that moment in history when technology development is resulting in weapons
and other machines with the predisposition to create explosive tension-pocket
impacts on the human body and mind, it has also created vacuum living
environments that lack the organic grounding to help a person to
psychologically process, absorb, and integrate the potentially traumatic
effects that result from the processes of these weapons and other
machines. And so the traumatic events
bounce back and forth within a person’s mind like floating figures in a physical
vacuum. The contribution of a vacuum
physical backdrop that ultimately leads to a vacuum psychological backdrop in
the mind has to be taken into consideration as an amplifier of all the diverse
emotional problems that are occurring today.
In other words, sensory distortion can have an enormous influence on
mental illness.
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