It has long been recognized that “history repeats itself”, but never before have we so clearly understood why history does so. Children who have been traumatized cannot heal themselves alone. It is one of the tragedies of human existence, that what begin as life-saving coping skills, end up delivering us into the hands of compulsive repetition. We are destined to reenact what we cannot remember. Freud called it the repetition compulsion and he said, “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating... He cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering.” [1] (p. 271).

The field of traumatic stress studies could say that it received an initial stimulus to growth from a dramatic reenactment. On May 6, 1972, the Op-ed page of The New York Times, published an essay written by Dr. Chaim Shatan titled, “The Post-Vietnam Syndrome” . In the piece, Shatan described the tragedy of Dwight Johnson and that piece attracted wide spread attention from Vietnam vets involved in rap groups around the country and helped mobilize a response that eventually led to important changes in legislation.  Dwight Johnson was a Medal of Honor hero who left the Valley Forge VA medical center on a three-day pass, went home to Detroit, held up a liquor store and was killed by the store clerk at point-blank range in an eerily similar repeat of a Vietnam experience [2].

One Sunday afternoon eighteen months after the kidnapping, the adult Barklays noticed a car parked on the road edging their property. The hood of the strange car was up. “Go see what’s going on, Bob”, one of the Barklays suggested. The fifteen-year old boy banged the door and went outside. A few minutes later shouts and screams in an Oriental language broke the calm of the afternoon. Cookie and Hal Barklay ran out. A tourist from Japan had stopped his rented automobile outside the Barklay’s property. It had been overheating. The tourist had lifted his hood in order to check the radiator. Just then Bob had come charging out of his house. He shot the tourist with his BB gun. It hurt. Stung the man badly. The tourist was both confused and outraged. What was wrong with this boy? These country people must be crazy.

We know what was wrong with Bob Barklay. The Chowchilla kidnapping had started, as far as Bob was concerned, with a van “in trouble” at the side of the road. As Bob’s school bus had slowed down to pass the van, three masked men had jumped onto the bus. Eighteen months after that, Bob spotted another vehicle seemingly in trouble at the side of the road. The start signal for a kidnapping po.pped off in Bob’s mind. The kidnapping was to take place at Bob’s own house. Everybody, his parents, his sister, and himself, were  in danger. 

The study of criminal behavior has much to gain from an understanding of traumatic reenactment. For instance, in 1988, Burgess and her colleagues released a study of serial rapists. In this study they noted that the rapists had a substantially higher rate of sexual abuse as children, other forced sexual encounters as children, and sexual abuse by family members. Their first reenactments of their own abuse began when they forced sex on other neighborhood children or family members as pre-adolescents[4]. 

Explanations for traumatic reenactment behavior vary widely. Some believe that the re-experience of traumatic memories is the way the mind has of trying to make sense out of what happened. Others hypothesize that trauma causes people to revert to a more primitive form of information processing and memory retrieval, so that the memories return in the form of images, sensations, and motor reenactments. Others believe that the victimized may identify with the perpetrator in an attempt to overcome the helplessness attendant on a traumatic experience. Alternately, the inability to self-protect may leave the victim as a target for subsequent victimization [5]. 

Based on what we know about the split between verbal and nonverbal thought, it may be that the most useful way of understanding traumatic reenactment is through the language of drama. Shakespeare told us that the whole world is our stage, and with behavioral reenactments we see this percept in action. The only way that the nonverbal brain can “speak” is through behavior, since it has no words. If we look at reenactment behavior we can see that the traumatized person is trying to repeatedly “tell their story” in very overt, or highly disguised ways. If only we could still interpret nonverbal messages, perhaps we could respond more adequately to this “ call for help”. For healing to occur, we must give our overwhelming experiences words. In “Macbeth”, Shakespeare urges us to “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break”. But we cannot find the words by ourselves. That is the whole point - the traumatized person is cut off from language, deprived of the power of words, trapped in speechless terror. We need the help, the words, the signals, of caring others, but to get their attention we must find some way to signal them about our distress in a language that has no words. This is the language of behavior, the language of the mime, of the stage. Unfortunately, we have largely lost the capacity for nonverbal interpretation, and so most of these cries fall on deaf ears [6-8].

Traumatized children are playing the role of their damaged selves. On the stage that is the school, they enact their pain, distress, fear, and rage. We are the audience and rarely do we make a meaningful interpretation of their play. We are far more likely to condemn them for trying to get attention, blame them for their negative behavior, and attribute it to effects rather than to causes, because the causes cannot be spoken but can only be seen in their symbolic, disguised behavior. In fact, all of our social systems, including our schools, have become so “trauma-organized” [9], that we do not even recognize it when we see it. It has become too much a part of our expectations, of all our reality, that we fail to perceive how truly abnormal our systems are, how unresponsive to fundamental human needs. People are constantly reenacting past experiences, often in very destructive ways, but we do not recognize this behavior for what it is. The victim of child sexual abuse becomes a prostitute, the boy who is anally raped becomes a serial rapist, the child punched in the heard for a bad report card grows up to beat his son to death. These are the headlines of our daily newspapers, but we only are willing to hear these as “excuses” that need to be fought against, rather than the explanations for behavior that could be prevented.