{"id":282,"date":"2012-12-20T01:24:19","date_gmt":"2012-12-20T09:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/?p=282"},"modified":"2013-01-05T01:24:43","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T09:24:43","slug":"in-the-face-of-trauma-a-depth-psychological-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/in-the-face-of-trauma-a-depth-psychological-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand\u00a0or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual.<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
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Psychologist\u00a0and\u00a0trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an \u201cAge of Trauma\u201d because, according to him, the \u201ctranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides\u201d (para. 2). He refers to ongoing\u00a0and\u00a0increasing global issues like global warming, terrorism,\u00a0and\u00a0economic collapse–all of which raise issues of existential vulnerability\u00a0and\u00a0threaten to annihilate the core framework by which we make sense of our existence. To this list by Stolorow, I would add the pace\u00a0and\u00a0intensity by which we are fed information by mass media which assaults us with information like a firehose, inundating us at every moment with horrific news about violence (like the recurring mass shootings), crime, disease, loss, death,\u00a0and destruction–allowing no time for us to integrate or \u201chold\u201d the news in a lifestyle which provides no container in which we can witness it. In addition, many of us begin to feel what I call \u201ctrauma fatigue.\u201d No matter how awake, sensitive,\u00a0and\u00a0compassionate we may be, there comes a point when we simply begin to shut down\u00a0and\u00a0wish to go back to \u201cnormal\u201d life. It’s all we can do to survive our own depth of emotions.<\/p>\n

Activist\u00a0and\u00a0author, Joanna Macy (1979) points to a general apathy in our culture which she defines as a state that derives from dread. She claims that we live in fear of confronting the despair we all carry that lives just under the surface. For Macy, despair is \u00a0“the loss of the assumption that our species will inevitably pull through” (p. 1, column 3). More\u00a0and\u00a0more, we are bombarded by data that questions, perhaps for the first time, whether or not our culture, our species, or even our planet will survive from an ecological, economic, or even cultural standpoint. Growing numbers of people are tuning in to this horror across a broad spectrum of the global population. Worse, Macy points out, feeling despair in\u00a0and\u00a0about a cultural context can be isolating, further amplifying the dilemma. She believes there is a psychic dissonance between our felt sense of impending apocalypse\u00a0and\u00a0the increasingly desperate mechanisms to maintain \u201cnormalcy\u201d as our society requires us to become adept at sweeping our fear\u00a0and\u00a0pain under the rug in order to avoid the taboo around directly addressing despair. “Our dread of what is happening to our future is banished to the fringes of awareness, too deep for most of us to name, too fearsome to face”\u00a0(Macy, 1979, p. 64). As well, individuals who tap into the unnamed dread often conclude it is\u00a0them<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0not society that is insane.<\/p>\n

The Western notion of individuality maintains that we are separate individuals experiencing something unique to each of us\u00a0andothers are disconnected from our experience. However, it is likely that in many cases, we have simply bracketed out the \u201coutside,\u201d–the collective memory of traumatic events that has accumulated over generations. Presumably, others with whom we have relationships are also experiencing the same trauma but it is unconscious, marginalized, silenced,\u00a0and\u00a0therefore invisible.<\/p>\n

Fassin\u00a0and\u00a0Rechtman\u00a0(2009)\u00a0refer to both\u00a0cultural trauma<\/em>, the collective memory of wounds that contribute to cultural identity of specific groups including the Holocaust, slavery,\u00a0and\u00a09\/11,\u00a0and\u00a0to\u00a0historical trauma<\/em>, events located in time that include acts of colonization, the atom bombs dropped in Japan,\u00a0and\u00a0apartheid among others. According to them, trauma embodies images of unacceptable suffering that are located in the body in order to ensure that these events never happen again. Social change in recent decades has redefined trauma survivors as \u201cwitness to the horrors of our age\u201d (p. 22), embodying our common humanity.<\/p>\n

Paul Shepherd compares dissociation to a fencing off of our psyche, a splitting, just as when we first fenced off plots of earth in order to manage them\u00a0and\u00a0accommodate our ongoing survival (in “My Name is Chellis…”, Glendinning, 1994). These fenced off areas of our psyche, once cut off, freeze in place, holding the contents in original untouched form, as if freeze-drying them to preserve the host from contamination.\u00a0Jung\u00a0referred to these split-off parts as\u00a0complexes<\/em>\u00a0(Donald Kalsched, 1996).<\/p>\n

Regardless, if left untreated, unhealed,\u00a0and\u00a0repressed, trauma leads to dissociation\u00a0and\u00a0abusive or pathological behaviors that tend to be passed on from generation to generation (Glendinning, 1994). To heal trauma, we must not only treat the individual symptomsand\u00a0lives of those who suffer, but also address directly the cultural\u00a0and\u00a0psychic legacy we have inherited over time as the trauma was passed down through generations. In places where individuals can no longer contain the horror of the trauma that continues to live in the unconscious realm, it erupts into the collective culture as violence, terror,\u00a0and\u00a0abuse.<\/p>\n

Even decades ago, C. G.\u00a0Jung\u00a0pointed out that our collective culture mirrors an individual who is suffering deeply from soul loss, manifesting in symptoms such as falling into conflict with himself, fragmenting into splinters in his pursuit of goals, interests,\u00a0andoccupations,\u00a0and\u00a0forgetting his own \u201corigins\u00a0and\u00a0traditions\u2026even losing all memory of his former self\u201d (Jung, as cited in Sabini, 2005, p.182). Disregard, numbing, or not wishing to see or feel the distress\u00a0and\u00a0negative effects that soul loss brings also moves us ever further away from deep connection an into a society where meaning is hard to find, compelling us try anything to fill up the gaping sense of emptiness that results, staving off the fear of annihilation that is core to the experience of trauma.\u00a0Jung\u00a0correctly diagnosed our compulsive, cultural tendency toward hyperactivity, saying, \u201cwe rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction,\u00a0and\u00a0restlessness\u201d\u00a0(in Sabini, 2005, p. 141).<\/p>\n

While this may ring true for many of us–even decades after\u00a0Jung\u00a0wrote these words–there is still much potential for each of us to engage with creative imagination to envision a world vastly different than what we experience on a surface level. There is so much \u201cdepth\u201d in the world–and\u00a0though we have access to remarkable context\u00a0and\u00a0meaning, we can hardly remember who we truly are in the face of deep-seated patterns\u00a0and\u00a0complexes. Depth psychology provides a unique opportunity to engage with the invisible, hidden, marginalized aspects of self\u00a0and\u00a0culture that are crying out to help us be whole. But we need to take a depth psychological approach–to slow down\u00a0and\u00a0listen–and\u00a0embrace the dark shadows in hopes of integrating all the aspects of what it means to be truly human.<\/p>\n

Visit www.DepthPsychologyList.com to find depth psychology oriented therapists and practitioners.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand\u00a0or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual. Psychologist\u00a0and\u00a0trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an \u201cAge of Trauma\u201d because, according to him, the \u201ctranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides\u201d (para. 2). He refers to ongoing\u00a0and\u00a0increasing global issues like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,40,1,39,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carljung","category-clinical-psychology","category-depthpsychology","category-psychotherapy","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}