Traumas as social interactions

Members of society use rage to re-direct the root cause of their depression (which is, as we said, self directed anger) and to channel it safely. To ensure that this expressed aggression alleviates their depression real targets must are selected and real punishments meted out. In this respect, “social rage” differs from the victim’s. The former is intended to sublimate aggression and channel it in a socially acceptable manner the latter to reassert narcissistic self-love as an antidote to an alldevouring sense of helplessness.


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We react to serious mishaps, life altering setbacks, disasters, abuse, and death by going through the phases of grieving.
Traumas are the complex outcomes of psychodynamic and biochemical processes. But the particulars of traumas depend heavily on the interaction between the victim and his social milieu.
It would seem that while the victim progresses from denial to helplessness, rage, depression and thence to acceptance of the traumatizing events -society demonstrates a diametrically opposed progression. This incompatibility, this mismatch of psychological phases is what leads to the formation and crystallization of trauma.

Phase I
The mismatch between the victim's reactive patterns and emotional needs and society's matter-of-fact attitude hinders growth and healing. The victim requires society's help in avoiding a head-on confrontation with a reality he cannot digest. Instead, society serves as a constant and mentally destabilizing reminder of the root of the victim's unbearable agony (the Job syndrome).

Phase II
Thus, when the victim is most in need, terrifi ed by his helplessness and adrift -society is immersed in depression and unable to provide a holding and supporting environment.
Growth and healing is again retarded by social interaction. The victim's innate sense of annulment is enhanced by the selfaddressed anger (=depression) of those around him.

Phase III
Both the victim and society react with RAGE to their predicaments. In an effort to narcissistically reassert himself, the victim develops a grandiose sense of anger directed at paranoidally selected, unreal, diffuse, and abstract targets (=frustration sources). By expressing aggression, the victim re-acquires mastery of the world and of himself.
Members of society use rage to re-direct the root cause of their depression (which is, as we said, self directed anger) and to channel it safely. To ensure that this expressed aggression They are rarely anything more than pedestrian providers and co-parents or, if they luck out, intimate companions in between their spouses's extramarital affairs with other, more abusive and, therefore, more thrilling and appealing others.
Cold feet: the remorse that accompanies a -usually major -decision (like getting married or acquiring a home). It often leads to passive-aggressive, reckless, immoral, or destructive behaviors intended to undermine further action and reverse course.
The recipient of such mistreatment is traumatized: he feels rejected or abandoned or betrayed or cruelly and unjustly abused or damaged. Trust is shattered.

Phase IV
Again, the members of society are unable to help the victim to emerge from a self-destructive phase. His depression is enhanced by their apparent helplessness. Their introversion and ineffi cacy induce in the victim a feeling of nightmarish isolation and alienation. Healing and growth are once again retarded or even inhibited.

Phase V
This fi nal mismatch between the victim's emotional needs and society's reactions is less damaging to the victim.
He is now more resilient, stronger, more fl exible, and more willing to forgive and forget. Society's denial is really a denial of the victim. But, having ridden himself of more primitive narcissistic defences -the victim can do without society's acceptance, approval, or look. Having endured the purgatory of grieving, he has now re-acquired his self, independent of society's acknowledgement.

Sundry observations on trauma and post-traumatic conditions
Trauma imprints everything and everyone involved or present in the stressful event, however tangentially. Places, people, smells, sounds, circumstances, objects, dates, and categories of the above, all get "stamped" with the traumatic experience. In an attempt to restore a sense of safety, the individual regresses to an earlier -familiar and predictable -phase of life and evokes parental imagoes and introjects to protect, comfort, soothe, and take over responsibilities.
In a way, the trauma victim parents herself by splitting her mind into a benevolent, forgiving, unconditionally loving inner object (mother or father) and a wayward, defi ant, independent,