In preparing for a new job in the social service sector I was referred a book by Sandy Bloom called "Destroying Sanctuary". It's the middle in a trilogy of "Creating Sanctuary", "Destroying Sanctuary", and "Restoring Sanctuary". It's a synthesis of all the recent information concerning the trauma's impact on the nervous system, small groups, organizations, and goes deep into the sociology of emotions, authoritarianism and attachment. Overall it was quite an amazing read, even if it tended towards the old psychology of "everyone's just hurting and we're all essentially the same". Other than that there were a few times that I wondered if Sandy was following Laura's work, since she does briefly mention psychopathy and even petty tyrants (however she cites an author of a research paper for petty tyrants, and not Castenada). If she'd focused more on psychopathy I think we would have an updated Ponerology on our hands. But she doesn't, though the research is quite extensive.
The authors point out the assault on social services in the West, specifically America, showing how the revolutionary movements in psychiatry, psychology and social work were stamped out by managed health care and psychotropic medications. 9-11 and the right-wing attacks on liberty are mentioned in a sort of "read between the lines" way. Ultimately it is a great look at our modern Ponerization. I did enjoy the book, so I'll post a few snippets. If anyone's interested in more I'll post some more. Enjoy!
From the back of the book:
For over thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault. People exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become disempowered and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future. Healing is possible for these clients if they enter protective environments, yet toxic stress has destroyed the sanctuary that our systems are designed to provide.
Linking trauma theory to organizational function, Destroying Sanctuary provides a framework for creating truly trauma-informed services.
Chapter 1 Human Service Organizations: Dead or Alive?
Chapter 2 "I Gotta Get Out of This Place": Workplace Stress as a Threat to Public Health
Chapter 3 When Terror Becomes a Way of Life
Chapter 4 Parallel Processes and Trauma-Organized Systems
Chapter 5 Lack of Safety: Recurrent Stress and Organizational Hyperarousal
Chapter 6 Loss of Emotional Management
Chapter 7 Organizational Learning Disabilities and Organizational Amnesia
Chapter 8 Miscommunication, Conflict, and Organizational Alexithymia
Chapter 9 Authoritarianism, Disempowerment, and Learned Helplessness
Chapter 10 Punishment, Revenge, and Organizational Injustice
Chapter 11 Unresolved Grief, Reenactment, and Decline
Chapter 12 Restoring Sanctuary: Organizations as Living, Complex, Adaptive Social Systems
The Human Operating System and the Virus that Disrupts It
Over the last few decades, research on the nature of attachment relationships has masde clear that for human beings, healthy attachment is a fundamental requirement for physical, emotional, social, and moral development. We understand attachment as the basic "operating system" for individuals. Without an attachment relationship in early development, people cannot become fully human. As the grandfather of attachment studies, John Bowlby pointed out, we remain attached to others from cradle to grave.
Exposure to trauma, toxic stress, and severe adversity disrupts the human attachment system in a wide variety of ways. Such disruption can wreak havoc on the "applications" we use to adapt to the world, such as learning, emotional management, and memory. Trauma and sustained adversity do to the human operating system what a computer virus does to a computer.
Terror management theory [that built upon Ernest Beckner's work] hypothesizes that human awareness of the inevitability and possible finality of death creates the potential for existential terror, which is controlled largely in two ways: a) faith in an internalized cultural worldview, and b) self-esteem, which is attained by living up to the standards of value prescribed by one's worldview. Research has in fact demonstrated that when the fear of death, or mortality salience, is triggered, even outside of conscious awareness, people tend to become more fearful, less tolerant, more prejudiced, more socially conservative, more supportive of leaders who support their worldview, more fundamentalist, and more punitive toward those who are disrupting or who threatened to disrupt their worldview. To date, over 300 experiments, conducted in 15 different countries, have provided support for terror management theory hypotheses.
When a crisis occurs, centralization of control is significantly increased with leaders tightening reins, concentrating power at the top, and minimizing participatory decision making. Even where there are strong beliefs in the "democratic way of life," there is always a tendency in institutions, and in the larger containing society, to regress to simple, hierarchical models of authority as a way of preserving a sense of security and stability.
"It is the increased salience of formal structure that transforms open communication among equals into stylized communications between unequals. Communication dominated by hierarchy activates a different mindset regarding what is and is not communicated and different dynamics regarding who initiates on whom. In situations where there is a clear hierarchy, it is likely that attempts to create interaction among equals is more complex, less well learned, and dropped more quickly in favor of hierarchical communication when stress increases".
By the end of the 1970s, the social and economic systems of the United States responded strongly to the perturbations of the previous two decades by invoking the powerful equilibrium-seeking devices of large systems, in this case American right-wing, authoritarian, religious conservatism. The Presidency of Ronald Reagan beginning in 1980 marked a change in the climate of the United States that swung progressively and radically away from the liberal agenda of prior centuries.
The human services version of this extreme rightward swing resulted in the criminalization of the mentally ill and the profound reductionism of biological psychiatry and behaviorism. Starting in the late 1970s, biological psychiatry was inexorably displacing psychodynamic forms of training in virtually all residency programs across the country. Biological psychiatry depends upon the expertise of - and several layers of - established authority: physicians, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the Food and Drug Administration. In contrast, psychodynamic forms of treatment, at their best, insist upon multiple layers of complexity and creativity. The individual is the expert about herself - even if she doesn't know it yet. And social forms of treatment look at the interactive social determinants of health and illness.
The conclusion we can draw is that violence is not unlike a contagious virus that is permeating our culture at a disturbingly rapid rate. We need a new framework - a trauma-informed framework - for understanding what happens to groups and entire organizations that are trying to contain the distress, frustration, and often overwhelming suffering of the clients and the staff.
