Is Detraumatization a Good Idea?
New insights on modern day assumptions
The idea of trauma has been around at least 150 years. The basic notion is that we can experience something, often but not necessarily in early childhood, so extreme that our brain cannot really process it at the time.
And so it has this mechanism to offset processing, with the expectation that at some point in our future development, it will be able to process what happened. And one of the problems with human development, and the development of the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes, is that we get an option here - one that animals do not have.
It's not really a conscious option. Rather we reach a stage in our development where we could process this traumatic event. But does the brain opt to do so?
Invariably not! Rather our prefrontal cortex elects to simply bluff it out. To move into a state of basic denial about the traumatic event held inside and to try and carry on as normal. The trauma remains inside and our brains learns to negotiate around it. For pretty much everyone, this process is not consciously mediated. It is automatic.
We see trauma as a bad thing - something that we don't want essentially. Few people like to think of themselves as a “traumatized person.” Thus, even though trauma is actually ubiquitous, the majority of us choose to not look too deeply and to thus maintain a basic state of denial. We’re fine.
But, over the last few decades, there has been some softening in Western culture around the notion of having been traumatized. Increasingly, it has become more and more okay, especially in educated middle-class circles, to talk about the parts of your childhood that previously you kept quiet about, or just totally avoided. In some areas of modern culture, in order to fit in, you actually need to be very vocal about your trauma.
Thus, Western culture is now more accepting of the reality of trauma than ever before. Coming out of collective denial, we now see trauma as a bad thing that has been imposed upon us by bad child-rearing techniques or abusive elders. Over the last decades, considerable evolution has taken place in how Western families raise their kids. We’ve become more gentle, more caring, in many ways more human.
All seems good. What could possibly be problematic about making childhood a less traumatic experience? Well, let’s take a look.
Because, as I’ve written and spoken about before, actually the systematic traumatization of kids is one of the primary mechanisms by which Western culture has been forged and developed.
We like to think of Western culture as being the product of the cultural enlightenment of a 15th and 16th centuries; of the dawn of science; of logic, rationality, technology. We like to think that these are a driving forces behind Western civilization. And to a degree they are. But, on an human level, in terms of the people who've really kind of forged Western civilization, it absolutely comes down to systematic traumatization.
Anyone familiar with Reichian Character Structure is in possession of the information needed to see this fairly clearly. I've been writing a book on the subject this Autumn. I'm going through the 5 character types and really fleshing out, in clear simple terms, what these five character types are. And one of the things that becomes clear is that we would not have Western culture were it not for some of these stereotypical characters, all of whom have been created by systematic traumatization. By that I mean specific parental strategies for bringing up kids, handed down from one generation to the next.
Without the Endurer type, who will simply sit in a menial, drudge role and continue along, getting up every day and doing it - where would we be?
Without the Rigid type, who will aspire for success, who is fixated on hierarchies, on material values, on rationality - how would Western civilization have created such a rise in living standards over the last centuries? It would not have happened.
You need Rigids. You need Endurers. And then the Aggressives have their own contribution - their libertarianism and entrepreneurship. The Orals can be creative and artistic and take out some of the pressure that comes from the endless rationality.
And then you have the Dissociating - Leaving Pattern - types who can invent things and who make great mathematicians, IT developers and scientists.
Without the combination of these stereotypes, how we have created Western culture? It would not have happened.
And I would like to point out that this does not necessarily mean that Western culture is “bad” because it has perpetuated itself through systematic traumatization. If you were to study any human culture, from anywhere on the earth or any time period, you would find that they also have their own practices to traumatize kids and to mould them in a certain way. This happens because the culture intrinsically seeks to perpetuate itself, and systematic traumatization is the most accessible means to achieve that aim.
So, what I think is important here - when we talk about de-traumatization specifically in the context of making parents raise kids in a more wholesome and less traumatizing way - is that we don't throw out the baby with the bath water. That we factor in the driving forces of Western civilization and how they are created.
What happens if we transform our parental techniques to the point where we are no longer creating, say, Rigid characters - to hold the hierarchical structures up and to set standards? Or if we're no longer creating Endurer characters to do all the drudge work? To my mind, these are important questions that go hand in hand with the notion of creating less traumatized Westerners.
Right now, in 2021, we’re seeing issues begin to manifest. For, since the mid sixties and the flower-power era, parental techniques have softened a great deal and largely become more human. Each generation since the “baby boomers,” that ended in the mid sixties, have become more gentle, heart-centered people as a rule.
As this has happened, so Western culture has found itself progressively struggling to forge a coherent sense of direction or to move forwards. In terms of Reichian Character Structure, this has come about because has been a huge, ongoing attack against the Rigid character type.
When I grew up, in the sixties and seventies, I was a rebel for a long, long time. I was very immature really, in my teenage years and in my twenties. I fought the system like crazy. I was a punk, I was a squatter, an anarchist anti-authoritarian. I fought against the whole infrastructure of the state and society - the government, the cops, older people who upheld social values. I attacked all the Rigids, basically.
But the power base of the UK in those days was still sufficiently Rigid to resist the aggressions of myself and the hundreds of thousands of other rebels in my generation. We could not push it over. We could not really weaken it. Our rebellion was relatively ineffective because there was still enough Rigidity in “the system” to easily contain our efforts.
But, since the sixties and the seventies, with the arrival of more soft and caring parental techniques, so the number of Rigids in the culture has progressively decreased. We’re not creating anywhere near so many any more. And now we've actually come to a point where, when young people are in their natural phase of rebellion, they can start to push effectively against this decreasing wall of Rigids. They can hurt “the system.”
This of course seems very exciting for those people in today's generation who are pushing against the bedrock institutions of Western culture. Because the power base is no longer strong enough to completely withstand them. It has to give ground. And that is visible. The father, so to speak, is down, is weakened. And the rebelling kids can start to push him over and make demands.
This is very interesting, psychologically, because, if you look back at my generation of rebels, we couldn't win against the power base. And so we were driven into a kind of “mirror” situation where we had to somehow come to terms with our youthful anti-authoritarianism and the hierarchies that surrounded us. Whilst by no means a perfect developmental model for all young people, nevertheless this process of rebelling and having to accept authority is a big aspect of human maturation.
But now, in today's generation, that is no longer happening. That bulwark of Rigids, that maintained the traditional power base, has weakened to such a degree, it cannot push back like in the old days, and must give ground. And, at the same time, the young people who are rebelling now feel excited like, “Wow, we finally got the father - the great patriarch of Western culture - on his knees!”
Then all the old people, like me or the other generations, are scared. We’re like “Whoa, where is this going?” Are we just going to end up with a culture run by a bunch of people who've never actually come up against that wall of authority and had to capitulate and mature from that process? And, secondarily, there’s a more basic fear that comes up when things look like they are changing permanently. If there’s really no longer a patriarchal structure holding the system up, where is Western civilization heading to? And will we be okay? Will I be okay?
I guess what concerns me as a therapist, working with the Reichian tradition and understanding some of the deep psychology behind trauma and civilization, is that the people who are on this bandwagon with cultural change may not recognize just how much we are in debt to these traumatic processes.
Something I see, being brought up in the West, is that we tend to live in this rather wealthy “bubble.” Like all bubbles, we mostly don't recognise and acknowledge the forces that caused it to come into being. Which, in this case, was generation upon generation of systematic traumatized kids. And, ideally, we don't want that bubble to completely burst and for Western civilization to go straight down the plughole.
Unaware of how much of a bubble Western society is, those people who are caught up in the ongoing thrust and impetus of culture war - pushing an agenda out against the Rigid patriarchy - may have a basic belief that they are just changing that five to ten per cent of a culture which doesn't work. They simply assume that the other ninety per cent will continue functioning in a nice stable manner whilst these changes go on.
Yet, unless you've really pulled back and understood the actual influences that have driven and shaped Western civilization, you maybe don’t realize that this really might not be the case. And that we end up triggering a far greater collapse in Western culture than is anticipated. It could return to a very simple, brutal authoritarian regime.
If you look at the whole of the world's population, and not just the ten or twelve per cent who live in the Western world, you will see that pretty much everyone else is living in these simple, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes that have emerged from our evolutionary roots. I think it's safe to say that, as Westerners, we don't want to go back to that.
To sum up, the fundamental point that I'm trying to make is that it could be dangerous to assume that de-traumatization is just inevitably a good thing. Especially if we don’t have anything to hold our culture up and get stuff done to put in its place.
It might seem, on the surface, that making childhood a less traumatic experience could have no negative effects. But it's important to recognise that our civilization derived most of its development from this process of systematic traumatization. Without having some means to achieve those same ends, simply de-traumatising our society may prove to be a trigger for widespread social collapse and the return to more primitive, authoritarian hierarchies.
Thank you for reading.