Excerpt from Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies.

It was Sigmund Freud who drew attention to what he called “the repetition compulsion, ” the all-too-human tendency to repeat the past. He connected it to traumatic experience and pointed out that through their actions people unconsciously repeat the past (Van der Kolk and Ducey,1989).

It has become clear that the very nature of the trauma response determines this repetitious behavior leading to the use of a more descriptive term, “traumatic reenactment” (Van der Kolk 1989). The memories of the traumatic experience are dissociated, nonverbal, and unintegrated.  Over and over, people find themselves in situations that recapitulate earlier trauma and lack any awareness of how it happened much less how to prevent it from happening the next time. The lack of awareness is due to the dissociative blockade that places the behavior out of the context of verbal and conscious control. Since words are not available to sufficiently explain the experience, thinking cannot really occur. Under these circumstances, people will usually come up with explanations for their strange and mysterious behavior, because the rational part of their mind is struggling to make sense of the situation. But without access to the dissociated material, the rational mind flounders helplessly, interpreting behavior in a simplistic, often stupid way, while the person helplessly re-exposes himself or herself to further trauma.

This lack of control over the repetition of trauma, combined with an insistent, albeit unconscious need to repeat the traumatic scenario is called a compulsion. A compulsion, by definition, is impossible to resist - the person is compelled to do what he may even consciously know is wrong to do. The power that motors this behavior is the energy that derives from the dissociated mental contents pressing for expression. When we are able to see it coming, we can stop acting and begin thinking about, and ultimately feeling and integrating the split of mental contents. This may be the most important function of psychotherapy.

People have a strong compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences, sometimes overtly but more frequently in a disguised, often highly symbolized, way. These reenactments which consist of the repeated establishment of the traumatic scenario that then gets relived over and over can come to dominate a person’s entire life and are comprised. In this way, Shakespeare's observation that the world is a stage is particularly apt. Each of us experiences the early drama of our own life, and then, for the rest of our years, we reconstruct the pattern over and over, using different people, places, and things, to play the same old roles, usually with the same old endings.

We must assume that as human beings, we are meant to function at our maximum level of integration and that any barrier to this integration will produce some innate compensatory mechanism that allows us to overcome it. Splitting traumatic memories and feelings off into nonverbal images and sensations is life-saving in the short-term, but prevents full integration in the long-term. For healing to occur, we must give our overwhelming experiences words. In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare told us “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break.” Both Janet and Freud claimed that the crucial factor that determines the repetition of trauma is the presence of mute, unsymbolized and unintegrated experiences (Van der Kolk and Ducey, 1989). Freud wrote that in order for feelings to be experienced (for affects to become conscious), words had to be linked to them. It was the linkage with word representations that allowed the affect to cross the repression barrier and become conscious (Sashin, 1993).

But we cannot find the words by ourselves. That is the whole point - traumatized people are cut off from language, deprived of the power of words, trapped in timeless,  speechless terror. But they do speak. They speak the language that existed before we had words or language, the language of action. Mimesis is defined as “the ability to produce conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic” (Donald, 1991). Through mimesis we re-enact or re-present an event or relationship. This is a form of self-expression and social communication that precedes the development of language and is evident in primates. It is the level of communication that underlies all modern cultures and forms the most basic medium of human communication and is central to all the arts (Donald, 1991). Mimesis is the basis of ritual behavior and the arts and in many ways is the basis of the human condition (Driver, 1991).

Reenactment behavior is repetitive and ritualized. It is so because it is usually not seen or heard for what it is - a signal to the social group. We are a social species. Once trauma has occurred and our consciousness has been split into fragments, there is nothing internally that will put “Humpty-Dumpty” back together again. The evolved mechanism for healing is not fundamentally biological - it is social. In their apparently crazy behavior, traumatized people are desperately trying to get the attention of their social group. Psychiatric patients have always been accused of “trying to get attention.” It is true. They are  trying to get attention. But that is because getting attention is precisely what evolution has programmed them to do. The problem does not lie with the body of the traumatized person. We have seen how their body has responded to danger in exactly the appropriate way. The problem lies with the corporate body, the social body, that refuses to play the role it is duty- bound to play. It is not the traumatized person who is basically sick. It is those people who fail to understand our oldest, bonded, interconnected language.

Multigenerational Transmission of Traumatic Reenactment

Our lives are reenactments not only of our own buried traumatic experiences, but also contain our family history. To the extent that our family history has been traumatic, the family traumatic reenactment then compounds and magnifies the individual traumatic reenactment . Intergenerational trauma has been best studied in research on the offspring of Holocaust survivors (Danielli 1985, Freyberg 1980, Kestenberg 1980, Sigal and Weinfeld 1989).  and can be summed up in one sentence: “The children of survivors show symptoms which would be expected if they actually lived through the Holocaust” (Herzog, 1982). Lenore Terr (1990) quoted a survivor and psychoanalyst as saying, “My thirty-five year-old son told me recently that he has had nightmares in which the Gestapo come up his stairs. You realize what this means? My son was born and raised in America. But he dreams my nightmare, MY life.”

 

Every Time History Repeats Itself the Price Goes Up: The Social Reenactment of Trauma

For information on purchasing the S.E.L.F. Group Curriculum

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

 

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