Chapter 9, "Rose-colored glasses and trauma"
A neighbor sits in my kitchen. “I choose to believe there is good in everyone,” she tells me, “because of the unintended consequences to my life if I do not. I feel an openness to others that wouldn’t be there if I didn’t believe that there’s good in everybody.”
I like this woman a great deal, and I worry for her. What she is saying sounds naïve to me, and worse, dangerous. But this woman is neither naïve nor foolish. She is, in fact one of those people of whom the world needs more. […]
[…] I answer honestly, the backlog of interviews with rapists, child molesters, sadists, and psychopaths jangling like discordant bells in my head. “You’d be lunch,” I say, “in a prison environment. The psychopaths would see you coming. And they would very quickly figure out what you want to see and give it to you. Before you know it, they’d be talking about spiritual values and poverty around the world.” The problem is, of course-and we both know it-the types of people who exist in prison also exist outside of prison. […]
The world is a pretty nifty place
Listen to New Age philosophy, and you will discover a remarkable thing: It consists almost entirely of beliefs that the world is controllable and benign. We all have a guardian angel who looks after us. […]The bad things that happen in our lives are all simply there to teach us karmic lessons. This is surely the best of all possible worlds. In fact, we really don’t have any problems at all that can’t be cured by tuning into a higher energy level. […]
But how do I tell that to my clients who were raped and molested as children, those who have been the victims of domestic violence, and most of all, those who have had children abducted or murdered? […]
What is billed as “New Age” is really older than time. People have always wanted to feel safe in the world and to fend off the frightening reality that the death rate is one per person and that the timing of it appears to have nothing to do with goodness. […]
The impact of trauma
It is easier to hold positive illusions if our lives are going reasonably well-by which I mean nothing dreadful is happening. […] Certainly other’s people traumas rarely devastate us, despite the fact we are now instantaneously exposed to every war, famine, earthquake, shark attack, and serial killer around the world. Nonetheless, despite the daily influx of bad news, we maintain our personal sense of invulnerability and safety. Something in us believes that all those terrible things will happen of over there, to someone else, but not to us. A logical appraisal of our chances of being traumatized may occur in our head but will not reach our heart.
In short, a child who is safe enough, loved enough, and protected enough grows up to be an adult with positive illusions, one who expects to be safe, despite what he or she sees all around. A perfect childhood isn’t needed, just an absence of overwhelming trauma.
But what happens when the adult is then exposed to a very serious traumatic event […] [examples of traumatic events]? [Our] worldview can shift dramatically, and positive illusions shatter upon exposure to severe, personal trauma.
My first exposure to the entire issue of positive illusions came when I saw what severe trauma did to normal people and how they felt about the world. […] It began, for me, with a child I will call Jonathan.
Jonathan didn’t seem destined to a traumatic childhood. […] But his childhood veered suddenly after he and his younger sister began attending a local home day care run by a woman with an adolescent son who sexually abused the children. […] Jonathan had not only been sexually abused by both offenders but had been forced to watch his younger sister be abused and to abuse her himself while the men watched. […]
I had known in the time I had treated this child that he was ashamed and guilty over molesting his sister, that he was frightened of the offenders, and that he dissociated to get away from the whole mess. But what I hadn’t known was that his entire view of the world had changed. He had gone form expecting good things of the world to feeling, as he said, that there was no such thing as good luck, only bad. Far from feeling safe and invulnerable, he didn’t expect to live to adulthood. […]
My client had developed what I now called a trauma-based worldview. It was little known in the field of sexual abuse at the time, but I found pockets of research on it in the larger field of psychology, mostly under the term “shattered assumptions”. […]
[Case of bus with kids kidnapped and buried alive is explained…] What she documented [psychiatrist Lenore Terr] in dry scientific language and meticulous detail was what being kidnapped and buried alive on a sunny day on your way home from summer school will do to a bunch of normal kids. What it did was to produce “massive interferences with optimism and trust.”
After the kidnapping, many of the [children] were no longer friendly or open and trusting. Sunny children with gentle dispositions turned sullen, even rageful, and their sense of the world changed as much as their temperaments. It was no longer a safe and benign world. Like Jonathan, thay no longer assumed they’d lived to adulthood. […]
In short, the children no longer felt invulnerable; they no longer believed they were safe; in fact, they no longer felt like they had any power at all. They had developed a trauma-based worldview. And these were the children that everyone thought had emerged unharmed. Instead, Terr found every child had been affected, every single one, for at least the five years she studied them. The occasional contacts she had years later told her that time did little to soften the impact.
