We hope you remember
the mentalist who goes under the single name, Kreskin—a student of the powers of the
mind, how our minds work, and what blocks them. If not, trust us that this man began
performing publicly in the sixties, using a combination of illusion and what he calls
“extremely sensitive perception.” He had bookings for decades all over the world
and during the 1970s hosted a five-season television program, “The Amazing World of
Kreskin.” A sometimes debunker, Kreskin wants the supernatural haze surrounding
“amazing” mental skills to be removed. He wants humanity’s higher mental
powers to be considered not paranormal but normal.
The reason we give this
introduction is that Kreskin has also written several books, and we want to quote from the
fourth one (ghost-written by Robert Bahr), Secrets of the Amazing Kreskin:
A few years ago on the
“Mike Douglas Show,” [remember that one?] I asked several top sports figures and
one police officer to stand eight feet from a hanging tire tube and throw a ball through
it. Each of them did so repeatedly and with no difficulty. Then I said to them:
“If I told you now
that you could not throw the ball through that tube, that you would fail at so easy a
task, do you think that you could do it?” A few smiled and nodded, and the rest
laughed and said, “Certainly.”
I asked them to think
of the most upsetting, distressing, and traumatic experience of their lives. It took a few
of them thirty seconds to decide what to think about, but finally they all assured me they
had such an incident in mind. I asked each of them to continue to keep the experience in
mind as they took turns throwing the ball.
They obeyed—and
not one was able to get the ball through the tube. Most of them missed the tire by great
distances, and one actually threw the ball over his head and behind him (p. 160).
When we first read this
account, we realized that it summarizes what happens in societies that systematically
traumatize their citizens for purposes of control. Dominator societies don’t want us
to be who we are. Our being who we are proves inconvenient, because dominator systems want
us to be who they tell us to be. They don’t want our creativity. They want our
obedience. They don’t want our real selves. They want our traumatized selves, our
frozen rabbit selves, ready to sacrifice everything for the promise of safety and
security.
Kreskin himself notices
something similar, though on a more specific scale:
Those men miserably
failed to fulfill their potential because I forced them to relive severe emotional trauma.
Millions of young
people today [we’d say millions of people of all ages] are failing in the same way to
live up to their potential for the same reasons. Living on the wrong side of the tracks
does not create failed lives. Neither does economic deprivation or crowded homes. When
those factors lead to severe emotional trauma—THEN they produce young people who
cannot succeed in the world (p. 160-61, our emphasis).
Kreskin’s point is
straightforward and (as usual with Kreskin) dramatic: when not subjected to trauma, the
athletes and the police officer could be themselves. When trauma intervened, they were
someone else. They couldn’t do what was normal for them. Traumatized, they
couldn’t live up to their creative potential. They couldn’t even perform what
otherwise would be a simple task.
In terms adapted from
psychologist Stephen Wolinsky (Trances People Live), these men had fallen into a trance,
so that they were no longer aware of their adult abilities. They went back to the trance
time—usually in childhood—a mental place where their normal, adult capacities
didn’t exist. Temporarily, they lost themselves.
This temporary loss of
self happens anytime an old trauma is triggered. In fact, it happens to all of us at
various times, and the more traumatic the culture, the more it happens—not only
through triggering old traumas but also through constant rewounding.
In our present culture,
rewounding happens systematically, though often unnoticed.
For instance, the
automobile industry takes wounding to new heights. Though most of us assume that
death-threatening driving is just the inescapable price of modern mobility, we need only
recall the film ‘Tucker,’ in which we’re reminded that safety features
pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s were not accepted as industry standards until the 1980s
and 1990s. And that doesn’t include the destruction of mass transit systems,
including trains. Nor does that include the celebrated debate over the last few years
about airbag deaths, for example, in which one of the large auto companies decided against
the “excessive expense” of recalls, because the deaths were not that
significant—even though infant deaths were involved. Not safety but the aim to
maximize vehicle sales, oil consumption, and highway construction has given us the
transportation system as we know it.
But driving on unsafe
highways has become so commonplace that we don’t notice how much we’re
traumatized virtually every time we step into one of this industry’s machines (which
most of us cannot avoid doing). The fears of death and daily bodily injury are not the
only fears, either. They have a companion—fear of the dreaded phone call that a loved
one is suddenly gone, killed in an auto accident. (We want to emphasize that we are not
finding fault with the industry’s workers here, those folks who put out a good
product to the best of their ability. Rather, we want to point out traumatizing industry
policy, about which those workers have no say and which all of us take for granted.)
The auto industry is
not alone, of course. The media do their traumatizing bit, rubbing our noses in violence.
The average twentieth-century person sees more violent acts in a single television program
or film than the average eleventh-century European saw in a lifetime. And that
doesn’t count the national news, which seems addicted to violence.
On top of these
traumatizers, the cultural dogma of competition—the Darwinian win-lose struggle for
survival—is thrust on us from our earliest years of schooling. As children, we head
to school wanting to cooperate and create. Instead we learn to battle for grades,
recognition, and rewards—which is preparation for a similar ongoing battle in
adulthood.
Nowhere is the
Darwininan dogma—and its consequent fears— more pervasive than in the money
system, always threatening us with poverty, which Gandhi called “the worst form of
violence.” And if we don’t fear poverty, how about affording next year’s
mortgage, the kids’ college fees, or that unexpected hospital stay?
In short, we seldom
live far away from trauma—not because trauma is inevitable, a low of nature or
society. No. Trauma is a mechanism of control used by a dominator model, a control
paradigm. When, for instance, a powerful adult hits a helpless child, the adult is using
power to create trauma for control purposes. Oppressive bosses use the same method, though
the tactics differ. When teachers humiliate students as “discipline,”
they’re establishing control. Our society has become so accustomed to dominator
methods that they’ve become accepted, and the control paradigm behind them has become
invisible.
What dominator
societies get from this system-endemic, institutionalized wounding is a two-tier
hierarchy: the traumatized bully and the traumatized victim. The first is created by
encouraging those who were bullied to bully back: “Do it to them before they do it to
you!” The strategy is: move them close to their own traumas, and as the pain starts
to break through, turn it into rage and direct it at someone (a strategy that Alice Miller
identifies with ruthless dictators). In other words, trigger the trauma and the feelings
of helplessness that went with it, and then turn the resulting anger into hatred for some
enemy or into a vocational drivenness that translates into worker exploitation, polluting
the world, or deceiving the public, just so it also translates into greater profits and
power.
Whenever we give up
being who we are, we can be fooled into aiming our anger or contempt at a
scapegoat—from a person to a race to humanity in general, “the dumb
masses.” All our trauma-energy gets fired like a bullet at “the other,”
especially if that “other” reminds us of our own helplessness. As Alice Miller
puts it, “Contempt for those who are smaller and weaker thus is the best defense
against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness” (The Drama of the
Gifted Child, p. 67).
Daily traumatizing can
also create the helpless victim, the second, lower tier of society. Psychiatrist Sandra
Bloom (and she represents pioneering work on trauma theory) explains that our
self-efficacy—our ability to deal effectively with dangerous situations—is put
to the test when any trauma threatens. If we can respond to the trauma, then we learn
effectiveness. Our sense of selfhood becomes more secure and confident. We understand our
abilities and our creative potential, especially if we can, as Viktor Frankl indicates
(see Man’s Search for Meaning), turn suffering into meaning.
If, however, there is
nothing we can do, then we learn helplessness. If the control-paradigm parent, teacher,
spouse, or boss cannot be stopped, then our self-efficacy disappears. And because this is
so often our experience in families, schools, and jobs—along with the social
traumatizers mentioned above—we’re conditioned into helplessness constantly.
Many times, we’ve
been told that the problem with humanity is that no one wants to fix the broken world. If
we listen to pundits or angry neighbors, we’ll hear that we humans are just lazy. Or
passive. Or sheep. But what’s really going on is what Sandra Bloom and her colleagues
call “learned helplessness.” She writes, “in an environment in which some
important outcome is beyond control, an animal will give up trying to alter its situation
and will come to expect that nothing it can do will change the outcome. The animal learns
to be helpless, and this helplessness persists even when conditions change” (Creating
Sanctuary, p. 22).
The same phenomenon
occurs in humans: “For children raised in abusive or neglectful homes, this failure
to achieve a feeling of competence or efficacy often pervades their entire development.
Regardless of what they do, how hard they try to please, how fast they run away, how
strenuously they try not to cry—nothing stops the abuse. As a result they often give
up any notion that they can affect the course of their lives in a positive way”
(Creating Sanctuary, p. 23).
The abuse doesn’t
have to be physical to have this effect, Sandra Bloom notes (and as we’ve said, it
doesn’t happen just with children): “[Children’s] sense of self-efficacy
can be seriously undermined by disparaging comments and by ridiculing and humiliating
statements from parents, teachers, schoolmates, and other caretakers” (p.23).
Fortunately, the
two-tier hierarchy can be dismantled. Trauma-created helplessness can be countered. It is,
after all, paradigm created and perpetuated. If we’re exposed to an alternative
paradigm, one that values us for who we are, we glimpse a new way of being. For example,
Alice Miller refers to the healing power of “witnesses,” adults who validate the
child’s (or other adult’s) experience. As Sandra Bloom writes, affirming
experiences—interacting from a different paradigm of who we are—can offset
trauma damage: “This absence or loss of self-efficacy can be countered with positive
social encouragement, persuasion, and example” (p. 23).
This is the good news.
Paradigms can be changed, and the shift starts with each of us. We don’t have to wait
for some institution to give the go-ahead, nor are we waiting. Many of us are more and
more aware that we need to heal from traumas, and that we can heal; we’re not defined
by our traumas. Granted, we may need professional help or support groups or a lot of time
and information. Whatever healing path we choose, though, we can heal. Then we have access
to our full potential.
The athletes Kreskin
“tested” weren’t people who couldn’t get a ball through a hoop; they
were athletes. Yes, their creative potential could be impaired by traumas. But when they
didn’t identify with those traumas—when they weren’t in the
trauma-trance—they had access to their true abilities.
If we’re not our
traumas, then we can be free of our trauma selves. Even more, we can help each other heal.
As we learn about paradigm-created trauma, acknowledge our own, and discover how traumas
affect our current feelings, self-concepts, and behavior, we become more sensitized to
what’s going on around us. Of course, we don’t usurp the roles of professional
healers, but we can do much to provide healing spaces and affirming contexts for ourselves
and those in our lives.
Along the way, we must
be wary of professionals who perpetuate the top-down, soul-abusive method, disguised as a
new-and-improved model of healing. Sandra Bloom cautions: “Implicitly, underlying
many of our psychiatric notions and our psychiatric jargon was the concept of
‘original sin’—that somehow the patients were ultimately to blame for the
troubles they got themselves into and if they would only do as they were told, they would
get better” (p. 8).
The “it’s
your fault so do what you’re told” approach simply recreates the feelings of
worthlessness and helplessness that dominator societies need to maintain control. In fact,
this model—what psychiatrist Peter Breggin calls “a kind of verbal shock
treatment” (The Heart of Being Helpful, p. 21)—encourages therapists themselves
to react according to their own unacknowledged helplessness. He writes, “Biological
psychiatrists, for example, drug, shock, and even lobotomize patients out of the
doctors’ own needs to control and suppress their patients—often out of their own
dreadful fear of intense emotion in themselves. Often the doctors are drugging and
shocking away their own guilt, shame, anxiety, and impotence in the face of their
patients’ suffering. Authoritarian psychotherapists do the same thing, but without
damaging their clients’ brains” (p. 45).
By contrast, Sandra
Bloom writes, “trauma theory has taught us that this [“official”
psycho-medical] perception is nonsense, that most psychiatric disorder is the culmination
of normal reactions to abnormal situations, situations largely created by the failure of
our social systems to provide traumatized children with the protection and care to which
they have a right” (Creating Sanctuary, p. 11).
Here, Bloom reflects
the ideas of many pioneering therapists and researchers in many fields. What people feel
is the trigger for a profound cultural change that individuals pioneer in their own lives
first. We cannot tolerate this trauma mechanism. To break its hold on us, we need space to
feel and process our traumas, especially for their implications for our societies and the
paradigm we use to structure our societies.
The implications that
Sandra Bloom and her trauma-theory colleagues draw from all this are in fact
social-paradigm implications—for each one of us. We’re all called to take part
in healing ourselves and our societies from the trauma system and cycle. “Suffering
demands a voice, a witness,” Bloom writes, “and that means giving up the freedom
to be a bystander.” She says that her book Creating Sanctuary “is a call for
more company out here, on the edge, on the firing line, speaking out against tyranny in
all its forms, including the tyranny of a dying and deadly vision” (p. 13).
In a word, she’s
calling for a paradigm shift: “Our existing paradigmatic structures no longer
adequately hold us. We appear to lack adequate methods to solve problems that are global,
interconnected, ecological, and biopsychosocial. We lack an alternative vision for the
future, and as the Bible says, without a vision a people perish” (p. 13). But she is
optimistic, even in dealing with trauma work—and so should we be: “I believe
that our work with some of the most injured and socially alienated of human beings
provides us all with important information about what we need to do to reconnect to each
other and to the natural world that sustains us” (p. 13).
The emerging
soul-honoring paradigm affirms that, because we are not our traumas, we have access to who
we are and the creative potential that accompanies our true being. And because of this, we
can change the world. To close with Sandra Bloom (Creating Sanctuary, p. 14): “A
sense of safety, wholeness, life, caring and home is something each of us actively
creates—or destroys—every moment of our lives. It is the ultimate choice of
every human being, of every human community. It is my hope that the insights we have
gained from our work with some of the most injured warriors in the battle of life can
contribute to an interdisciplinary, interracial, transgendered, global conversation
leading to a new, more human and attainable vision for the centuries to come.”
