Six Variations and Seven Roots of Trauma-1

I consider the early childhood of a heterosexual boy. I look at its relationships with the parents, though the same effects may be produced by other significant adults in the boy’s life. I am interested in explaining the effects of the two most severe forms of trauma, those of fast-onset and slow-onset trauma [¹].

The most severe form is fast-onset trauma and it can devastate the child. Because of its severity, the trauma may be wide-ranging in its effects, influencing the whole mind of the child. By this I mean that the child may, for example, become afraid of all parental symbols. If the parent concerned was the father, then instead of being afraid just of the father’s authority, it becomes afraid of all male authority figures. Similarly the mother may make it afraid of all female authority figures.

The second most severe form is slow-onset trauma, when milder episodes of distress occur many times. Each episode, by itself, is not excessively severe, but the cumulative effect builds up till distress overwhelms the child. Because the build-up of stress is gradual, the eventual trauma becomes more localised and specific in its effects on the mind. The child may focus its responses mainly on the parent and not necessarily on general parental symbols.

In fast-onset trauma, the core identity of the child is damaged; when he becomes an adult he may develop hostility to authority figures. In slow-onset trauma, the core identity becomes confused; if the mother caused the trauma then when he becomes an adult he may become wary of social and sexual relationships with women. Confusion means that he may engage in social and sexual relationships with a woman so long as the woman is in a good mood; when she switches to a hostile mood he has to withdraw rapidly if he can.

The difference between fast-onset and slow-onset trauma may be noticeable in the adult’s behaviour. When he experiences excessive (for him)
stress, then the influence of either trauma may make him submissive. In addition, fast-onset trauma may tend to make him passive.

In this article and the next two, I initially consider three primary themes that help in understanding trauma, with each theme having one or more subsidiary themes. The themes are degradation, denigration, and rejection. Then in a fourth article I refine this model in order to give seven themes in total, three being primary, three being secondary, and one being a tertiary theme.

Trauma can affect the child in several different ways, and trauma can be either fast onset or slow onset. The typical symptom of slow-onset trauma is depression – by this I mean the occurrence of depression on a regular and long-term basis. Depression is based on self-pity, and there are three modes of self-pity: self-pity alone, and self-pity as modes of guilt and jealousy [²]. So there are three forms of depression, and so each of the themes of trauma produces its own kind of depression.

The response to any form of trauma is a binary one, by which I mean that a child can swing between accepting the distress or fighting against it. It can respond by acquiescing in its distress, by accepting that it is to blame for its sorrow, or it can fight against the distress and feel that it is not to blame for its sorrow. If it fights against the distress, then it has aligned itself with its conscious mind, but when it acquiesces in its distress it is aligning itself with its subconscious mind. The child may settle on one of the binary responses, but at any time in life it can always switch to the alternative response. This gives six different variations (two per primary theme) on trauma, or six variations in the way that severe distress can affect a child. I consider each of these variations next.

The saving grace in all these misfortunes is that severe pain doesn’t destroy the sense of humour, though it may not be much in evidence. Though pain does tend to make humour more eccentric, even weird, I find.

Theme of Power and Domination

I consider a severe form of trauma, where the sensitive child feels crushed. This is usually due to excessive punishment, causing the child to experience distress beyond its capability to manage. Most likely the parent’s aim is not to discipline the child or teach it better manners, but simply to control it. The parent may think that the punishment is not excessive, but this view is not the important one. It is the child’s view of punishment that is important since this view helps to determine its reactions. If it is overwhelmed by the punishment, it may go “off the rails” and its behaviour becomes chaotic and unpredictable, or else it may become passive and just obey orders.

An outburst of anger by a parent is the main emotional means of dominating a child. Anger leads to the punishment being excessive. After the heavy punishment, the child feels crushed. When the child is crushed, it loses its sense of self-love or self-esteem. It experiences desolation. The long-term emotional effect is that the child develops exaggerated intensities of fear and anger in it. In later life its responses to potential distress within its relationships often switch between fear and anger. The function of anger is that it enables the child, once it is an adult, to overcome temporarily the barrier of fear.

In terms of emotion, crushing implies neutralising the sense of narcissism (in love mode) of the child and reducing that child to guilt (in self-hate mode). When an adult feels crushed by life, this feeling is only a replay of what he felt as a child. In this state, only survival means anything. Another feature of guilt (in self-hate mode) is that in suitable people it produces a receptivity to asceticism and a bleak outlook on life.

In later life, when any situation activates the influence of trauma, the adult’s thinking becomes absolute in that situation. Usually he cannot make moderate choices. When he decides to do something different, something that is more “positive”, his response is always “over the top”. The excessive reaction is needed to switch from passivity to activity.

The theme of being crushed revolves around the child’s sense of Being and non-Being. In more familiar terms, this theme is about power, the power to be an individual. The ultimate ground of a balanced sense of Being is always a balanced state of narcissism (in self-love mode). In the absence of sufficient self-love, the person may switch to the other mode of narcissism, that of vanity, and create various ideals as ways of trying to attain a better balance in his life. The reason for this switch is that vanity is the emotional support for all kinds of ideals. This role of vanity is revealed during a deep psycho-analysis. [ Using a pictorial analogy, I think of vanity as the carrier wave upon which ideals are superimposed. For example, if a person sets the pursuit of justice as an important ideal, the emotional base of this ideal is vanity plus the pursuit of justice; if he sets the pursuit of power as his ideal, then his emotional motivation is vanity plus the pursuit of power]. If the intensity of guilt is too great, so that narcissism (in vanity mode) is neutralised, then vanity on its own becomes unbalanced: the person’s ideals are either crushed as well, or else they can become extreme. This effect has had a noticeable role in history. If a person grows up well-balanced, then he rarely, if ever, becomes a political revolutionary; but if he experiences severe trauma in some form, then he may well become a political revolutionary if the opportunity appears. In the case of political activism, trauma may not necessarily originate from the family but from the social circumstances, such as growing up within a minority group that is persecuted by the hostile majority group or culture.

Another way of looking at this kind of trauma is that it helps to cause feelings of degradation and debasement in the child. It cannot develop any sense of self-esteem. It only feels a deep sense of powerlessness. It loses its desires to achieve anything of meaning and value in the world.

The adult may compensate for the distress of trauma by developing his character and his ideals. To offset his feelings of degradation, he may follow ideals that centre on the nobility of life, and try to develop a nobility of character.

Repudiation of the Theme

I consider what beliefs the child will form when it feels that it is not to blame for being severely punished. I look at the different influences that the father and the mother exert on the child.

The child may repudiate the excessive punishment by the father, or by any other significant male. When the child has become an adult, he works with ways of handling and overcoming fear, often by pursuing some social forms of dominance and power. He does to others what was done to him. Because his fear is excessive, so his desires for dominance and power also become excessive. Because his dominance is masking his fear and supporting his vanity, so his use of dominance is mainly negative and not beneficial to society at large.

In my early teens I often daydreamed of power, of being a powerful industrialist who owned great numbers of companies; I varied this format by dreaming of being a great military leader who conquered whole areas of the world for my own pleasure. This was how I over-compensated in my attempt to feel a satisfying sense of self-worth and self-importance. In history we see the march of great military conquerors who enacted similar passionate daydreams in much more negative and dramatic ways: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler. Hence I assume that the motive for such feats was a sense of being crushed by the father or other significant male. Other great military leaders like Alexander the Great were at least beneficial to their own countries, so I assume that their motivations had other compensating factors in addition to the sense of being crushed as a child.

In the 1970s-1980s the West witnessed the obsession within the business world of creating huge enterprises by swallowing up numerous smaller companies. This obsession of many managers with having a colossal business empire I again assume has its roots in the sense of being crushed as a child.

The child may repudiate the excessive punishment. When he is an adult he may pursue sexual forms of dominance and power. He may enter the world of BDSM (bondage, domination, submission, and masochism) and become a dominant master who likes to control female slaves in extreme ways – this is a socially-acceptable way of doing to others what was done to him.

Acquiescence of the Theme

Now I consider what beliefs the child will form when it feels that it is to blame for being severely punished. Again I look at the different influences that the father and the mother exert on the child.

The child feels that it is to blame for the severe punishment: it must have deserved that punishment because it is a bad child. Its subconscious mind becomes very influential as its sense of narcissism (self-love mode) is crushed. Both modes of guilt are influential on the growing child. I sometimes felt that I was a weakling in my early school days, which implies that guilt (mode of self-pity) was a familiar emotion to me. When reduced to this state of mind, the child feels that it is incapable of doing or achieving anything because its motivation is switched off. In adulthood, it may feel that it is a failure in life.

When it becomes an adult, guilt (self-pity mode) is a major influence on its character. He may take menial jobs as his way of earning a living, since he prefers to avoid having responsibilities. His quality of life is low. He may choose to live in areas of a city that are run-down and poor, since such areas mirror his subconscious idea of himself, which is a sense of degradation. In my 20s, I spent nine months being a roadsweeper and occasional dustman, even though I had a college degree in physics. Being a roadsweeper fitted well with my sense of inner degradation. I had no ambitions in life, no goals that I wanted to attain. I was also involved with squatting in derelict houses with my friends. This living in debasing conditions mirrored my inner degradation. I felt that I didn’t want anything better, and so I embraced asceticism. In derelict houses I symbolically lived my childhood trauma from father.

The form of depression that this trauma produces is that based on guilt (mode of self-pity). The unconscious idea that sustains guilt-based depression is “I am a sinner” or “I need to be punished for my sins”.[³]

There is a variation to the theme of having menial jobs. When the sense of being crushed is not quite so extreme, the person may take jobs that give him a sense of isolation from society. The novelist Somerset Maugham describes, in one of his travel books [4], a certain kind of person who takes a job in non-Western countries where he can live within the local native culture and stay separated from Western culture. So he may be the only Westerner living in a village or small town that has not been Westernised and usually there are no other Westerners within a hundred miles of him.

The person is typically reticent about himself. He loves his life amidst the local culture and accepts that modern Western life has no meaning for him. He is self-sufficient, usually has few responsibilities and adopts a sense of resignation to life. Such people lead solitary lives, without any Western friends, and do not welcome the company of Western strangers. If necessary, when a Western traveller calls on one of them, he will talk politely to the traveller, but when that traveller leaves he will express no desire to see the stranger again. Such people ask for nothing but to be left in peace. A variation of this happened in the past when lighthouses, before they were automated, were operated by solitary people for months on end.

Maugham did not understand the motivation for this kind of behaviour. I have an affinity for such people since, at some points in my life, I too would have liked a job that offered such relative isolation. These people flee from their own country, or more specifically, they flee from the social conditioning of the society and its mores which crushed them. Therefore, they can be at home in a foreign country where the social conditioning is different and so does not directly stimulate the negative aspects of their subconscious minds. Only in a foreign land or a foreign culture can they begin to be their idea of themselves, since the foreignness of their adopted world does not stimulate their subconscious guilt (in self-hate mode). They don’t have to live up to anyone’s social expectations and they are free of the moth-eaten morality of their social origins. They prefer to avoid their fellow countrymen if possible, since if they meet another Westerner then their original social conditioning kicks in again and doesn’t fade away once more till after the visitor has departed. Although the man flees from Western society, he does not flee from women and so may have a good relationship with a local woman.

The child may acquiesce in the punishment. When he is an adult he will be able to have a comfortable relationship with a woman as long as she is in a good mood. However, he is unable to face an angry woman. In the presence of the anger, his anxiety level may go sky high and he has to retreat. He may not develop normal relationship skills, since he is frightened of a woman when she is in a controlling mood. After perhaps a few failed attempts to partner a woman, he may prefer to seek consolation in religion. Or he may become a recluse or a hermit, since he is fleeing from women.

Some Effects of Degradation

I look at some more generalised forms of behaviour due to a sense of being crushed. Some behaviours may be very destructive: since the person cannot directly confront authoritarian people, he may take his revenge on symbols of authority because they stimulate his social fears. Because of such fears, he tries to keep his identity secret. So, for example, we witness people who delight in destroying churches (especially Catholic churches, since they act as symbols of religious authoritarianism), banks and commercial institutions (symbols of alienating economic authoritarianism), and university buildings and staff (academic authoritarianism). In recent times we have seen the exploits of the Red Army Faction in Germany, and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) in America.

When such negative behaviour is more extreme, then we witness the murder of strangers by serial killers. The murder of strangers becomes the ultimate expression of having dominance and power: the killer crushes his victims. If the killer was crushed by his father, then he is likely to target males as his victims. If he was crushed by his mother, then he will usually prefer women to be his victims.

Other factors may come into play and add their influences to the sense of being crushed. Then the adult may become submerged into deeper psychological confusion and may even manifest some kind of mental disorder such as madness.

[³]. Unconscious ideas are explained in my three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [3]

[4]. Maugham, Somerset. The Gentleman in the Parlour. Pan books, 1930 and 1986. Pages 76-78. [4]

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Ian Heath
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