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What does it mean to have
individual lives, entire families, and whole cultures become “trauma-organized
systems?”
Human history
becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells
Outline of History, 1920
Trauma-Organized
Culture
Trauma is a central organizing principle of human thought,
feeling, belief, and behavior that is largely overlooked in existing
explanations of and responses to human behavior.
Communal and family
life becomes organized around the denied, suppressed, and dissociated memories,
feelings, and experiences of the past and are then relived in the present.
The past haunts the
present and determines the future.
Unresolved individual
and collective trauma shapes our “mental models” – the way we view reality.
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The Sanctuary Model of Organizational
Change |
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By The Crowd They Have Been Broken, By the Crowd They
Shall Be Healed: The Social Transformation of Trauma |
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Every Time History Repeats Itself, The Price Goes Up |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Part I (23 MB) |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Part II (16MB) |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Part III (18 MB) |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Part IV (22 MB) |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Whole Article (80 MB) |
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Neither Liberty Nor Safety: The Impact of Fear on
Individuals, Institutions, and Society, Whole Article - smaller version
(3 MB) |
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For those interested in the connections between politics and
psychotherapy, John Wiley Publications is now publishing the official
Journal of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility,
Psychotherapy and Politics International, edited by Nick Totten.
Dr. Bloom has written a series of four articles for this new
journal illustrated by the gifted political cartoonist, Clay Bennett from
the Christian Science Monitor. From Editor Nick Totten's introduction to the
final of the four-part series: "..we have the final part of Sandra
Bloom's massively authoritative investigation of societal trauma, a
multidisciplinary triumph, which makes a powerful case for the usefulness of
this model in accounting for socio-political degradation. Step-by-step,
Bloom has shown how trauma functions in parallel ways on an individual,
group and mass level to attack both emotional and intellectual intelligence.
She has created a vocabulary for discussing phenomena like America' s lurch
to the right after 9/11, or Germany's after the Treaty of Versailles, or
Israeli treatment of Palestinians as a consequence of the Holocaust. If the
relevance of psychotherapy to political analysts were still in doubt, this
paper would suffice as evidence". Nick Totten, Editorial, p.2,
Psychotherapy and Politics International 4:1-3 (2006). |
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Societal Trauma: Democracy in Danger |
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Trauma and the Nature of
Evil |
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The Importance of Dissent: A Meditation
on the Danger of Dangers |
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Bloom and Reichert, M. (1998) Bearing Witness: Trauma
and Collective Responsibility. |
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Bloom, ed. (2001) Violence: A Public Health Epidemic and a Public Health Approach. |
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The dangers of authoritarianism |
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Connect to
information and papers on psychohistory |
Chronic Cultural Stress
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Traumatic
stress appears in one generation
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Transmitted
down via disrupted attachment, distorted parenting skills, and distorted
cultural norms
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Distortions
reinterpreted as “normal”
What happens to a community when large numbers of people
have deep-seated, multi-generational emotional wounds?
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Collective
Trauma
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Collective
Dissociation and Denial
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Collective
Amnesia
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Collective
Repetition of Failed Strategies
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Collective
Disaster
Collective Trauma
“a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the
bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.
The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the
awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of
suddenness normally associated with ‘trauma’. But it is a form of shock all the
same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective
source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared… ‘I’
continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’
continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer
exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body”
Kai Erikson,
A
new species of trouble: The human experience of modern disasters. 1994
Chronic Disaster
“In
individuals this manifests as “a numbness of spirit, a susceptibility to anxiety
and rage and depression, a sense of helplessness, an inability to concentrate, a
loss of various motor skills, a heightened apprehension about the physical and
social environment, a preoccupation with death, a retreat into dependency, and a
general loss of ego functions” (p.21).
Kai Erikson,
A new species of trouble: The
human experience of modern disasters. 1994
The Social Legacy of Trauma
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Disrupted Attachment
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Increased social
splitting, loss of integration
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Focus on simple solutions
to complex problems – inability to see the whole – dissociation –
fragmented awareness
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Inability to identify
danger
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Preoccupation with past
prevents dealing with the present or preparing for the future
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Multiple Addictions
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Alcohol
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Illegal drugs
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Legal drugs
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Nicotine
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Sex
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Money
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Work
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Violence
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Abusive
authority
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Bullying
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Competition over
cooperation
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Corruption of leadership
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Abuse of laws
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Increased crime
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Increasingly punitive
justice system
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Hypermoralism
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Violence
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Avoidance and
Denial
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Denial of problems &
secrets
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Deceit and a web of lies
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Avoidance of
responsibility and accountability
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With increasing
deterioration, increased efforts at control that are ineffective because
denial must be maintained
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Paranoia, projection,
perpetration
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Violence
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Automatic
repetition
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New problems, old
solutions
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More of the same, of the
same, of the same
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History repeats itself
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Violence. . .
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Alienation
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Loss of empathy
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Powerlessness
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Isolation
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Loss of identity
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Loss of social cohesion
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Loss of shared purpose
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Hopelessness
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Cynicism, bitterness
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Meaninglessness
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Violence
Attributes of a Violent Community
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Knowledge is
spurned – we already
know what we need to know and there is no other way that works
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Solutions for
working together break down –
just do what I tell you to do
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Loss of
participation in decision making –
I make the rules around here
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Authoritarian
leaders – do what I
tell you to do or else
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Power is used
abusively – whoever
has the power makes the rules, and I have the power.
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Action
replaces thought – you
don’t need to think and talking is a waste of time, just do what I tell you
to do
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Increase in
secrecy- everything
here is on a ‘need to know basis’ and you don’t need to know
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Rules replace
norms – for every
problem there is a new rule
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Non-coercive
methods for resolving disputes not taught –
if you have a problem with
that, it’s too bad
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Environment is
rife with conflicts that are never resolved
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Nonviolence
seen as ludicrous –
nonviolence with THESE kids – don’t be ridiculous.
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Bullying
increases and is contagious
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Pool of
bullies and victims increases
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Democratic
processes are lost
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Loss of
ability to deal with complexity
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Community
loses a sense of purpose
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The community
vehemently denies that there is a problem. This denial can take four basic
forms:
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Direct denial – it’s not
that violent (or it always has been); it’s not that significant a
problem
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Over-simplification – lock
up the violent people and everything will be fine; that’s all in the
past we are ok now
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Over-generalization - using
an example of the successful use of force to justify more force
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Stereotyped response
patterns – failure to recognize that violence isn’t working, that things
are getting progressively worse; that history is repeating itself
Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the
world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very
often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they
have on our behavior.
Peter Senge, 1990
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization, p.8
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