No One Hates Like a Traumatised Child

If one were to try and summarise the principle factors that shape human culture ongoingly, I figure that a big one would get left out. We know technology is a factor. We know politics is in there too. We know nation state power struggles are a part of it. But the traumatised child?

Yet if you look at the forces that shape our culture, you have to consider from where comes all the libidinal energy that is needed to drive forwards change. Who is the most determined against all odds to make the future different? Who is willing to work tirelessly for the cause? That would be the traumatised child. And not just any traumatised child.

The group of traumatised kids who will work the hardest for change are those who, for whatever reason, cannot heal. Because to heal you have to accept the wounding. You cannot just stick it on the perpetrators and seek payback, telling yourself you’re making the world a better place. You have to accept it. You have to own it. You have to feel it. And you have to share it. And when you go through this process, you release the charge of energy repressed within. And the drive to change the world that you experience is reduced.

Those who are unwilling to let go of the charge, who use it as fuel to create social change, end up creating the future. They become the driver. For better or for worse, this is how society works.

Earlier today, I was reading a Substack article about the rapidly expanding field of child surrogacy. It discussed the legal implications of having children freely available, on the open market, pretty much in the same manner as other commodities. Thinking about the kind of world that would emerge from this, what struck me as a therapist, was that the one pushback against the commoditisation of children will likely come from the early generations of kids born in this manner.

I was one of tens of thousands of kids adopted in the UK in the early sixties. Many of us were so traumatised that we ended up pushing back in whatever manner we could against the society that we identified as having created us. The social problems of the first large generation of adopted kids resulted in the UK both reducing adoptions and exerting a greater degree of control over who could adopt.

I think that surrogacy, as it becomes a bigger and bigger phenomenon, will go through a similar process. From the generations of traumatised children, should they be the result, there will be those who do not heal. And who will thus fight - some directly, others covertly.

If the family system continues to degenerate in the manner that it has for the last decades, and surrogacy slowly becomes the norm, we will enter a brave new world that will be forged by those who eschew healing and who push back against their perceived creators. I think that it’s going to be quite a journey.