Societal Trauma: Democracy in Danger

Neither Liberty Nor Safety (80 MB)

The Sanctuary Model is a method for enhancing democratic processes and thereby increasing an organization's capacity for  social learning, conflict resolution, and problem-solving. The key ideas behind the Sanctuary Model are applicable to any setting. In human history thus far, the best method for nonviolence that people have evolved is democracy (Rummel, 1997). The objective of any democratic system is to minimize the abusive use of power and since all victims of trauma have had formative experiences with the abuse of power, democratic processes become fundamentally important to their recovery. Internally fragmented and self-abusive, they need to establish more of a democracy inside their own head, and they need to be able to function more democratically in the external environment as well. This poses interesting problems for the staff because although we can talk a good game about how democratic we are as a people, it is one of the most rigorous practices a person can engage in, and thus rarely happens outside of a milieu intending to practice it. Part of what makes engaging in democratic processes so difficult is that exposure to trauma can systematically undermine the capacity to engage in the kind of tolerant, trusting, calm, thoughtful, non-authoritarian social and cognitive processes that developing consensus requires.  Instead, repetitive exposure to high states of arousal leaves us hypervigilant, mistrustful, hyperaroused, anxious, and preoccupied with issues of control. As a result, the most traumatized people are often those who have the most difficulty practicing democracy whether they are patients in a psychiatric setting or officials running our organizations and our government. For the last sixty years, the practice of the therapeutic community has focused on democratic processes as a key to growth, change, and social learning.

Democratic Participation as an Antidote to Trauma

• Requires process

• Emotional management skills

• Words as substitute for action

• Shared decision making

• Shared problem-solving

• Development of mental flexibility

• Social skills development

• Minimizing abusive use of power

• Empowerment

• Participation

• Demonstrable fair play, restorative justice

• Trust-building

• Negotiation, concession, compromise

 Democracy represents the ideal of a cohesive community of people living and working together and finding fair, nonviolent ways to reconcile conflicts.

 Gastil, J. (1993). Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making, and Communication.

R.J. Rummel, "Democratization," In William Vogele and Roger Powers, PROTEST, POWER, AND CHANGE: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NONVIOLENCE ACTION FROM ACT-UP TO WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE, Hamden, CT: Garland Publishing, 1996.

The Importance of Dissent: A Meditation on the Dangers of Danger

Sandra L. Bloom, M.D.

May 14, 2005

Liberty and the right to protest. Civil rights and freedom of speech. The right to dissent is a fundamental requirement of democracy. Our willingness to express a differ­ing opinion appears to be inextricably bound up with our most cherished values. But why is this so? When dissent is suppressed we focus on this suppression as a violation of rights as it certainly is. But why is dissent so important to the functioning of any group, from one as small as a family to one as large as a nation? And why do we willingly silence dissent, even when we so cherish the right to free expression?

The key to understanding the conflict be­tween freedom of expression and the silenc­ing of dissent can be found in an analysis of the role of stress – particularly extreme stress - in individual and group life. For groups, as for individuals, a little stress is good for us. Stress stimulates growth, development and innovation. But too much stress – including stress that lasts too long - is toxic. Overwhelming stress in individuals leads to physical, emotional, and social adjustment problems that have become well documented. Although there is an extensive body of infor­mation about the effects of stress on individu­als, less study has been devoted to the impact of stress on groups. Families, workplaces, organizations, and even countries are more than the sum of the individuals involved, and systems such as these respond to severe stress in certain characteristic ways that may serve short term survival of the group but which can have long-term negative consequences for the wellbeing and healthy functioning of the organization and of all the individuals that comprise the group.

What causes organizational stress? Anything that compromises safety and security for the system. Organizational safety has at least four components: physical safety – which extends to include financial security; psychological safety – the safety of individual expression within the organization and organizational “self-esteem; social safety – the safety of group functioning; and moral safety – the organizational ethics and integrity in pursuing its mission. Like individuals, organizations must manage emotional expression since too much emotion in any environment can create confusion and an interference with function while too little emotion can become demoralizing and can stifle creativity. Within organizations it is the decision-making, problem solving and conflict resolution methods that help a system routinely manage emotions that can become destructive if not properly channeled but which can greatly assist organizational functioning when they are directed to constructive purpose and the achievement of organizational goals. Organizations experience losses – of leaders, of funding, of work partners, of members – and must grieve for those losses. And if they are to be successful, all organizations must develop a vision that propels them into an imagined future. This vision is usually embodied within the organizational mission and goals. Groups may also experience conditions of extreme stress. The events of Sep­tember 11, 2001 produced extreme stress in the United States captured in the frequently spoken expression, “America will never be the same again”. Families experience the death of members, domestic violence, divorce, job loss, house fires and other traumatic events. All of these are examples of situations of extreme stress that may have large and often unrecognized impacts on organizational as well as individual function.

When confronted with extreme stress, individual function changes rapidly in order to accommodate to the situation with responses that are more likely to promote survival. The fight-flight characteristics of the human stress response prepare us to survive under emergency conditions that are the exception to the rules of normal functioning. We enter a state of high arousal and hypervigilance with attention directed at whatever is the source of the danger. Complex – but time consuming thought patterns are replaced by a more rapid form of information processing characterized by the reduction of multiple options to only dichotomized either-or-choices. Emotional expression may be sealed off, a condition commonly called “shock” which is the acute form of dissociation, because emotional arousal can so easily interfere with cognitive functioning and an action response. Attention is directed at the source of the threat and other environmental information is ignored as extraneous and irrelevant to the immediate danger. An urgent need to take action compels us to fight or to flee. Aggression increases dramatically and therefore violent action is far more likely while impulse control plummets since it interferes with rapid response.

But the human stress response is not a totally individual response. Human beings are social animals and responding to danger with a unified group response accounts for much of our ability to survive as a species. When we are under threat, we experience an increased attachment behavior directed at those individuals and groups to which we have already formed an attachment. Threatened families tend to pull together under stress as do threatened workgroups and threatened nations. Group cohesion and unified action is achieved through a series of steps that is part of the human stress response. In stressed groups, a leader is likely to arise and in an emergency we are likely to follow the leader who most convincingly asserts superior knowledge about how to survive the emergency. Human beings love to engage in conflict – a movie, a book, a television show, or a play without conflict are recognized as boring – but under stress, group conflict is dangerous because it interferes with the rapid mobilization of a coherent group response. As a result human groups tend to strongly silence dissent and externalize the conflict by projecting the conflict onto an external enemy and the more strongly the convincing leader urges a group to resolve its conflicts by these methods, the more strongly the group becomes bonded to the leader. Since the increased group aggression must be projected outward, overt violence against the perceived enemy is more likely to occur.

As long as the danger to the individuals and the group can be removed through these methods, the results can enhance group survival. However, two conditions interfere and may even sabotage these efforts so that they become ineffectual and even disastrous: when the complexity of the threat requires a more complex response than the individual or group can summon under the impact of stress; or when the threat itself become chronic and repetitive.

When danger becomes chronic or repetitive, the biology of individual changes and the effects of these individual changes, compounded by escalating group responses turns a evolutionary survival mechanism into an evolutionary time bomb. Chronic exposure to danger creates chronic hyperarousal in overly stressed individuals. In this state, people respond to even minor threats as if they were major threats and are likely to react accordingly. Extremist thinking becomes chronic leading to further difficulties with problem-solving and flawed decision-making. The tendency to act – and act violently – escalates dramatically. The numbing of emotions simultaneously reduces concerns about one’s own well-being and reduces the capacity for empathy with others. Other vital, but apparently less immediately stressful concerns, are ignored as attention to threat becomes chronic. The employment of aggressive responses becomes chronic leading to a state of chronic conflict and the need to seek out perpetual enemies. As the need to justify previous actions and defend faulty judgments expands, explanations become increasingly bizarre. The leaders who have made these faulty judgments become both bullying and deceptive, needing to lie not only to their constituents but to themselves. Dissent must be suppressed using ever more coercive and forceful means because surfac­ing the previous and present conflicts now is seen by flawed leaders as more dangerous and destabilizing than ever before. In this way, individuals and groups under stress can become incapable of comprehending or dealing with situations of great complexity.

Complex problems require complex solu­tions and complex solutions are never the product of a single mind. Complex solutions require the participants in any problem-solving venture to start from some basic shared  and the means by which they are going to get there. For complex solutions to emerge in any situation, there must be sufficient safety for the individuals within a group to voice divergent opinions and challenge the existing status quo. Individuals and groups must grieve for whatever has been lost in the struggle for survival and be willing to recognize their present resistance to change. There must be sufficient calm and mutual respect for human cognitive function to work at peak efficiency and sophistication – conditions impossible under the impact of chronic stress. To reduce the externalization of aggression, group conflicts must be withdrawn from the enemy and reabsorbed by the group. To counteract the effects of stress a leader must seek out and welcome dissent and guide a group toward the integration of multiple points of view. The dissenting voice in any group contains the necessary seeds for the solutions of complex problems because the dissenters contain in embryonic form, ideas that are new or previously discarded by the group faced with a problem that will not budge. Without recognizing the dissenting voice, a group is quite likely to follow a leader, like lemmings, over a cliff.

For all these reasons, democracy is a ne­cessity, not a luxury. Democracy is the best method yet that human beings have evolved for managing complex problems with a minimum of violence. The more democratic principles are compromised, the greater the likelihood of poor decisions, faulty judgments, escalating levels of conflict, and ultimately violence. Dissent – and the engage­ment in creative conflict – is the cornerstone of democratic processes and in an ever more complex world, silencing the dissenting voice imperils human survival.

	Mental Models
	Sanctuary Model of Organizational Change
	Components of the Sanctuary Model
	Social Legacy of Trauma
	Trauma Theory
	Seven Commitments of Sanctuary
	Community Meetings
	Therapeutic Community