In a social work class early this year trauma was the week’s curriculum focus. As it is a current funding and policy imperative that all health and human services be ‘trauma-informed’, students in all related disciplines are being tutored in this outlook.
An hour or so into the class, a Nigerian student thoughtfully, and quite powerfully, interrupted the seminar leaders’ account of the official effects of trauma. He asked ‘Is trauma a Western invention? My father has experienced many of the horrors you say are traumatic, and has had none of the consequences you say are inevitable. Not so much as him, but so have I had these experiences and not had the [expected] consequences’.
Tanvir Ahmet, a Bangladeshi psychiatrist and author of Fragile Nation: Vulnerability, Resilience and Victimhood, has noted that the definition, effects and status of trauma have been very particularly standardised in the current Western account. Reflecting on his work in western Sydney treating an Afghani man who had experienced his country’s thirty years of carnage, he found him to have minimal pathology – that is, until he regressed as his treatment socialised him to interpret his past experiences as traumatic, or psychologically untenable.
It is beyond dispute that an individual’s processing of experience is strongly mediated by the meaning the individual and the group ascribe to particular events. For example, if a fire or flood is understood as a ‘natural disaster’ comes to be re-interpreted as due to human-induced climate change, or some specific human in/action such as governmental negligence, this will modify the phenomenological effects of the event. Similarly, if a psychological / mental-health lens is used to interpret a person’s actions – in the case of ‘trauma’, a ‘developmental aberration’ – this will reframe how the locus of responsibility is allocated. This brings the issue of personal accountability to centre stage.
With this in mind, a key problem with the standard account of trauma is its emphasis on ‘triggering’. In this frame, ‘bad behaviour’ is represented as an out-of-character, automatic overreaction, where the person is understood to be subject to involuntary neural processes that render the person’s actions a-volitional. In such a scenario, metaphorically, and sometimes quite literally, it is possible to guiltlessly bite the hand that feeds you, or much worse. You just can’t help yourself: this is what the diagnosed, indeed educated, trauma sufferer learns.
In this frame there is no mens rea, no awareness of one’s own possible contribution, even culpability, in one’s behaviour and actions. I have a gold-standard alibi: I can’t be expected to see it (my reaction, often bad behaviour) coming, so how can I be at fault? Yes, over time, I can learn about it and seek to improve my ‘margin of tolerance’, but I will forever remain the victim of my traumatic past. This schema comes to be a core part of one’s identity
Psychologising is now a cultural religion. Rather than regarding life’s ups and downs as par for the course, we are told to articulate our interiority using the vocabulary of mental health. This repurposes everyday struggle as synonymous with pathology. Not feeling positive, optimistic, up and at it? If you are thinking you don’t have the world on a string, that you are not in control and moving forward, take a mental-health break or, better still, get your GP to refer you to the Better Access program.
Best of all, think in terms of childhood trauma: ‘We all have them [traumatic memories] tucked away in the lower part of our brain, in the cerebellum’, a leading clinical psychologist told his Australia-wide listeners recently on Radio National’s Life Matters. If you are not showing your best self, hey go easy. It’s not your fault!
Now, beyond trauma being a sacred element in the practice ideologies of specialist coteries, a psychologising cult is being disseminated for universal consumption. It is even applied in the case of people like Donald Trump, as in his niece psychologist Mary Trump’s observations. Even as she is deeply critical of him, the psychologising approach offers interpretations that take individual responsibility away.
For example, she argues that her uncle Donald is ‘incapable of forming close relationships’, that ‘Donald isn’t close with anybody’. It turns out that he … ‘was a cocky, rude teenager, who was intensely jealous of his older brother, Freddie … [and] had no friends’”. She goes on: it’s not possible to understand her uncle without seeing him as a product of a ‘malignantly dysfunctional family’ Of course, there is some merit in this account, but it remains reductive, rather than summative.
Gabor Maté too has interpreted Trump’s behaviour in terms of a traumatic past:
I can give you the example of Donald Trump who had a really traumatic childhood. Trump’s father was a psychopath who really demeaned and harshly treated their [sic] children. So Trump decides, unconsciously, that (by the way I am not talking about his polices; it is not a political debate. I am not choosing sides) I am just saying you can see his trauma in every moment he opens his mouth; his grandiosities, his need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive. And he has as much as said in this autobiography that the world is a horrible place, a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is after you, everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth, and this your friends, never mind your enemies. That’s the world he lives in, and that world he lives in reflects his childhood. And, he gets to be successful in this crazy world, and his brother, on the other hand, drank himself to death. And I look at both of them [and] I see dysfunction, significant dysfunction.
A physician and psychotherapist who deserves respect, Maté is no trendy lightweight. Like Naomi Klein, Peter Beinart, Gideon Levi and other prominent Jewish intellectuals, he has been vilified because he has advocated for Palestinians for more than a decade, actively criticising Israeli policies, and on occasion working in Occupied Palestine, including Gaza before the current genocide.
Why then does Maté, who has a solid moral compass hold, essentially, that Trump is not responsible for his actions and attitudes? Because he is the end-point product of a dysfunctional psycho-biographical assembly line? But really, can the whole agency–structure debate just be put aside? Can Trump’s personal accountability really be held at zero because his upbringing was that of a New York rich-kid who suffered travails due to a feral kingpin dad?
In Maté’s account, Trump’s pathology is supposedly explained by simultaneously citing two heavily freighted terms: ‘trauma’ and ‘[disrupted] attachment’. Logically, this conjoining of terms is a mélange, but as rhetoric it has symbolic capital as it both privileges and conflates the significance of each term.
Trump may be a far-out example, but he is not a stand-alone or unprecedented entity in the United States’ super-hero fixation, on the loner who can’t afford to trust anyone. This loner figure represents his nation’s mytho-pathetic public pathology. I/we are exceptional – ‘Look in wonder at my / our achievements!’ – even as I/we are perennially slighted – ‘Losers always knock winners’. Like their auto-fabled nation, game face on, he is the individual who determinedly puts himself on show, who takes the hits, who stays indefatigable and can-do. Sure, he can lash out, but those who continually put themselves out there to battle can’t be blamed. He reinforces the mantra for his kin: ‘Only the weak will fail.
For many, Trump enacts multiple myths. Part transcendent TV celebrity, part comic book Davey Crocket, part John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, part Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he is The Man, the longed-for imagined, solitary hero who ventures forth from the common world of mere mortals into a region of supernatural wonder.
Back in the actual world, as adults we can choose to, or we can have the good fortune to, participate in interactions that aggregate trust. As those on the Left well know, a sense of camaraderie is not a given; it is generated when we engage with and stay the course with others in committing to a common cause. A sense of belonging, of solidarity, can be an outcome in these actions even if a specific battle is not won. In the non-political domain, in the anarchically creative dynamics that instantiate intimacy – in friendships and romances, in extended families and neighbourhood relations (amongst a potentially far broader mix of possibilities) – we can choose to challenge the patterns that we have historically tended to enact if we take the decision to interact more ethically. For example, one can choose to not ‘flake’ – to turn up to events and occasions one has agreed to even if you don’t feel like it. That a degree of change is possible is now even being considered by some attachment theorists. This progressive group contend that adults can build ‘earned security’ in practising trustworthy, other-oriented relationships that modify, if not ever entirely supplant, established patterns.
Regarding Maté’s view that Trump’s hideousness is explicable in terms of purported childhood trauma we could think instead of class and society. Years ago the playwright Barry Dickins remarked that a particular kind of nastiness is only found in good homes. In being smug and superior, he contended successful households have a disregard for non-winners that is insidiously violent. Disguised by their respectable personae, this disavowed meanness is allied to an I-have-to-be-the-winner mentality. This stance legitimises the sense of privilege and entitlement that financial success, and the most expensive private schools, embed. For this mob, sentiment is occasionally permitted, even prescribed, but there is no noblesse oblige among those who always want more. It follows that business, sporting and old school networks will be transactional, as are all relationships. Extract, exploit, use – this is the dog-eat-dog zero-sum worldview of a particular class. Trump may be among the most egregious examples of these ferals, but he is a true member of this very particular anti-social class.
Comments
Dear Mark,
I want to let you know how much I appreciated your essay on trauma in the latest Arena Quarterly.
I am a paediatrician and have spent some time volunteering in Timor Leste – giving clinical training to newly graduated doctors (they attend a medical school in Cuba for their three undergraduate years).
Here I work for a child development unit for NSW Health. We have had training in ‘trauma-informed care’, many of our patients have a history of developmental trauma and have high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores.
I thought introducing the Timorese to the notions of DT would be of interest to the group – as they had suffered the violence/dispossession/forced transfer to Indonesian concentration camps etc. They also have housing insecurity (after a heavy rain many homes are flooded) and DV and child abuse is very common.
To my surprise the group showed no real identification with the issues of DT. To find out more I asked them to anonymously fill out an ACE questionnaire – I am not sure how familiar you are with this clinical tool, but a score of 3+ out of 10 is significant and makes you vulnerable to the long-term physical and mental health consequences and intergenerational effects. Their scores averaged out at 7+, and yet they did not identify themselves as victims/sufferers of trauma. After reading your article I see them as a group of Nigerians!
I think they would agree that DT is a ‘western invention’.
I also remember a morning after a heavy rain, there was flooding throughout the low-lying areas in Dili. Many of the trainees had river effluent running through their houses during the night – they all came to work on time and with perfectly laundered clothes, as usual. No one talked of the ‘trauma’, or needed counselling.
Thanks again,
Nils
Dr Nils Hanson FRACP
Moss Vale
NSW 2577