It seems almost impossible now, but when I was a kid in the mid 60’s, it had only been about 20 years since the end of WWII. For adults now, that is like 1999. Remember 1999? We had the weird Y2K commotion, and that was about the time of the Macarena, but do you remember that time as a different era? Do you tell stories of that time when, say, the iceman came through town on a horse-drawn wagon to deliver ice door to door with tongs? That was what my dad told me about growing up in the 20’s, but no – 1999 was no “good old days.”
And neither, then, were the 1940’s to adults in the 1960’s. That was a time not that long ago for many millions who had lived through the trauma of WWII. The trauma ran deep, as is does still for army Vets and refugees today, but the numbers who were affected were on a scale hard to imagine now. Yet, our soldiers who returned – forget about the tens of millions of refugees – were told by an acquiescent society to forget about the bad stuff and get on with life. Hey, we won! Get a great post-war job, make babies, and start planning on white-washing that picket fence!
The reality must have been different, though. In the recent book Unbroken, we learn of a rescued POW whose life almost disappeared into a bottle due to post traumatic stress. My own father quietly let his own (former) PTS known to me when I was a young adult, although as subtly as he could. But it was really in the early and mid- 60’s when I learned of the suffering of the Greatest Generation although I didn’t know it at the time.
I was not supposed to know it. It was hidden in black and white films made in the late 40’s and early 50’s that spoke to those people, mostly men in the US, of their deep psychological trauma. As I child I could not know this. They rarely were direct, as, say, Unbroken or Born on the Fourth of July were. Rather, they depicted men involved in dark, psychotic fantasies that never were resolved – hardly the formula for box office success. And yet those movies were made, so apparently they sold, to, I would think, those men who silently suffered, along with their wives. They knew.
I remember one in particular that still gives me chills. It was about an officer in some agency, maybe the FBI, but something official where they wear guns, who had been exiled on an island where he was constantly watched, never allowed to escape. He knew that they were up to no good – that they were keeping him on the island because he had information that they did not want out. He did not remember that information, but he knew that his was because of the drugs they were slipping him, and because of their brainwashing. As the movie unfolds in ominous black and white, we see him plotting to escape, making it to the lighthouse at the tip of the island, overcoming the guards and stealing a gun, and then making his way to the top of the spire to confront the arch-villain. There he was going to find out the truth behind his incarceration, and then force the villain to take him back to the mainland where he would expose the plot to the proper authorities.
We root for him the whole way, hoping for his escape from this totalitarian dystopia. But then, at gun point, the villain speaks. At first we do not believe him, conniving villain that he is. Then it begins to become clear: the villain is no villain, and the hero is not a prisoner on the island, at least not as he thinks. Rather, this is a mental institute for those made insane through deep trauma. The hero’s trauma is not war; rather, it is one made by his mentally unbalanced wife who had drowned their children, who he finds floating face-down in front of their vacation property as the wife sings some eerie chant. Here, she either kills herself with the hero’s gun or is shot by the hero himself. I can’t recall, but in either case, this revelation rocks us with such horror that we begin to understand his trauma. We get a sense of why our hero is desperately trying to hide this reality because it is simply too much for him to bear. We also get a sense of the great sacrifice that the institute is making to try to heal this man – who is, as an agent of whatever capacity, a true but broken hero.
I know two Viet vets who confess to PTSD to this day, a psychological nightmare that continues to screw them up royally. We can imagine that the trauma of guts and death, so far beyond what they were raised to expect, haunts them as this disturbing movie does us, but for real and to the bone. It was a movie that took me decades to understand as one of several post-war film noir’s made as quiet tributes to the men who suffered mentally but could never say so publicly.
Trauma – it happens when bad things happen that we have not been trained to expect. Warfare is an over-the-top example for us, as we, unlike, say, the tribal Sioux, were not raised to relish killing and to expect dismemberment and death. But it is no exaggeration, no advertisement for psychology, to say that we have all been traumatized. In my own small circle of friends and family I can recount so many of deaths, so much sickness, several problems of insanity, of drug abuse, of bad divorces – the list goes on. These, too, are in their way over-the-top, for none of these are necessary for us to become traumatized. Rather, all it takes is life as it is.
Why this should be is puzzling, as, according to science, we were bred for this life over millions of years of evolution. Think, however, of your own child or some other small child that you have known well. Are they all geared-up for pain, for violence, for mental nastiness, for failure and disappointment? Are they set to take on the world as-is like some soft, pudgy ant? Or can you tell already that they are going to be upset, to be torn down, and on occasions to be turned upside down by events of this life? Of course. This is the trauma of every one of us, whether we want to be silently stoic about it or not. And somehow, even as this is the destiny of all of us, it doesn’t seem like it should be, not to those who promote social panaceas, nor, really, to any of us. It seems as if, like our soldiers in war, that we were not raised or even made for this life.
I don’t think we were. I think, rather, that the world in which we have grown to understand is like the fake world of our hero, made in our own minds to blot out some horror that sent us to this world in the first place. I could allude to the Garden of Eden and the Fall, but for many that would be too fanciful. And yet, the evidence for our trauma, of some sort of break with our full being, is all around us. It is, for one, in our desires for a perfect world, which I doubt troubles any other animal. Where did we get that notion of a better world? More so, we often see glimpses of the majesty and mystery of the world that shatters our quotidian perceptions. We see in these glimpses a far greater truth than we ordinarily know, but we then inevitably fall back into our gray, tiny little world. Why? We obviously have the capacity to know a greater reality, but something in us makes us refuse it.
That, I believe, is where the trauma of ordinary life comes in. We all have to block out the fantastic at a very young age to deal with the older brother, the older kids at school and the school itself, so that we might deal with the even bigger traumas of adult life. We hunker down; we blame the authorities, whoever they might be, or life itself for our discontent, until we are confronted (blessed, really) with a larger truth – which we quickly forget. We don’t want to be vulnerable, to be amazed, to be out our depths ever again. So we go back to living on our little island for the traumatized, helped now and then by the sages and prophets, but often to no avail.
“Be as the little children” was never intended to mean, “Be selfish and ignorant like children often are,” but rather, “be trusting and open to all life has to offer.” I honestly don’t know what type of world we would then have – certainly, we would have to have additional guidance from some holy or superior force to keep us from living on the island of “Lord of the Flies” - which refers to Satan and has great repercussions, but that is not the point being made here. Rather, it is that we are all in need of therapy for the trauma of life. For this therapy to work, we need both openness and trust. The trick lies, then, in finding the right lighthouse keeper in whom we can finally trust, who can lead us out of our trauma and back to the mainland.
It seems almost impossible now, but when I was a kid in the mid 60’s, it had only been about 20 years since the end of WWII. For adults now, that is like 1999. Remember 1999? We had the weird Y2K commotion, and that was about the time of the Macarena, but do you remember that time as a different era? Do you tell stories of that time when, say, the iceman came through town on a horse-drawn wagon to deliver ice door to door with tongs? That was what my dad told me about growing up in the 20’s, but no – 1999 was no “good old days.”
And neither, then, were the 1940’s to adults in the 1960’s. That was a time not that long ago for many millions who had lived through the trauma of WWII. The trauma ran deep, as is does still for army Vets and refugees today, but the numbers who were affected were on a scale hard to imagine now. Yet, our soldiers who returned – forget about the tens of millions of refugees – were told by an acquiescent society to forget about the bad stuff and get on with life. Hey, we won! Get a great post-war job, make babies, and start planning on white-washing that picket fence!
The reality must have been different, though. In the recent book Unbroken, we learn of a rescued POW whose life almost disappeared into a bottle due to post traumatic stress. My own father quietly let his own (former) PTS known to me when I was a young adult, although as subtly as he could. But it was really in the early and mid- 60’s when I learned of the suffering of the Greatest Generation although I didn’t know it at the time.
I was not supposed to know it. It was hidden in black and white films made in the late 40’s and early 50’s that spoke to those people, mostly men in the US, of their deep psychological trauma. As I child I could not know this. They rarely were direct, as, say, Unbroken or Born on the Fourth of July were. Rather, they depicted men involved in dark, psychotic fantasies that never were resolved – hardly the formula for box office success. And yet those movies were made, so apparently they sold, to, I would think, those men who silently suffered, along with their wives. They knew.
I remember one in particular that still gives me chills. It was about an officer in some agency, maybe the FBI, but something official where they wear guns, who had been exiled on an island where he was constantly watched, never allowed to escape. He knew that they were up to no good – that they were keeping him on the island because he had information that they did not want out. He did not remember that information, but he knew that his was because of the drugs they were slipping him, and because of their brainwashing. As the movie unfolds in ominous black and white, we see him plotting to escape, making it to the lighthouse at the tip of the island, overcoming the guards and stealing a gun, and then making his way to the top of the spire to confront the arch-villain. There he was going to find out the truth behind his incarceration, and then force the villain to take him back to the mainland where he would expose the plot to the proper authorities.
We root for him the whole way, hoping for his escape from this totalitarian dystopia. But then, at gun point, the villain speaks. At first we do not believe him, conniving villain that he is. Then it begins to become clear: the villain is no villain, and the hero is not a prisoner on the island, at least not as he thinks. Rather, this is a mental institute for those made insane through deep trauma. The hero’s trauma is not war; rather, it is one made by his mentally unbalanced wife who had drowned their children, who he finds floating face-down in front of their vacation property as the wife sings some eerie chant. Here, she either kills herself with the hero’s gun or is shot by the hero himself. I can’t recall, but in either case, this revelation rocks us with such horror that we begin to understand his trauma. We get a sense of why our hero is desperately trying to hide this reality because it is simply too much for him to bear. We also get a sense of the great sacrifice that the institute is making to try to heal this man – who is, as an agent of whatever capacity, a true but broken hero.
I know two Viet vets who confess to PTSD to this day, a psychological nightmare that continues to screw them up royally. We can imagine that the trauma of guts and death, so far beyond what they were raised to expect, haunts them as this disturbing movie does us, but for real and to the bone. It was a movie that took me decades to understand as one of several post-war film noir’s made as quiet tributes to the men who suffered mentally but could never say so publicly.
Trauma – it happens when bad things happen that we have not been trained to expect. Warfare is an over-the-top example for us, as we, unlike, say, the tribal Sioux, were not raised to relish killing and to expect dismemberment and death. But it is no exaggeration, no advertisement for psychology, to say that we have all been traumatized. In my own small circle of friends and family I can recount so many of deaths, so much sickness, several problems of insanity, of drug abuse, of bad divorces – the list goes on. These, too, are in their way over-the-top, for none of these are necessary for us to become traumatized. Rather, all it takes is life as it is.
Why this should be is puzzling, as, according to science, we were bred for this life over millions of years of evolution. Think, however, of your own child or some other small child that you have known well. Are they all geared-up for pain, for violence, for mental nastiness, for failure and disappointment? Are they set to take on the world as-is like some soft, pudgy ant? Or can you tell already that they are going to be upset, to be torn down, and on occasions to be turned upside down by events of this life? Of course. This is the trauma of every one of us, whether we want to be silently stoic about it or not. And somehow, even as this is the destiny of all of us, it doesn’t seem like it should be, not to those who promote social panaceas, nor, really, to any of us. It seems as if, like our soldiers in war, that we were not raised or even made for this life.
I don’t think we were. I think, rather, that the world in which we have grown to understand is like the fake world of our hero, made in our own minds to blot out some horror that sent us to this world in the first place. I could allude to the Garden of Eden and the Fall, but for many that would be too fanciful. And yet, the evidence for our trauma, of some sort of break with our full being, is all around us. It is, for one, in our desires for a perfect world, which I doubt troubles any other animal. Where did we get that notion of a better world? More so, we often see glimpses of the majesty and mystery of the world that shatters our quotidian perceptions. We see in these glimpses a far greater truth than we ordinarily know, but we then inevitably fall back into our gray, tiny little world. Why? We obviously have the capacity to know a greater reality, but something in us makes us refuse it.
That, I believe, is where the trauma of ordinary life comes in. We all have to block out the fantastic at a very young age to deal with the older brother, the older kids at school and the school itself, so that we might deal with the even bigger traumas of adult life. We hunker down; we blame the authorities, whoever they might be, or life itself for our discontent, until we are confronted (blessed, really) with a larger truth – which we quickly forget. We don’t want to be vulnerable, to be amazed, to be out our depths ever again. So we go back to living on our little island for the traumatized, helped now and then by the sages and prophets, but often to no avail.
“Be as the little children” was never intended to mean, “Be selfish and ignorant like children often are,” but rather, “be trusting and open to all life has to offer.” I honestly don’t know what type of world we would then have – certainly, we would have to have additional guidance from some holy or superior force to keep us from living on the island of “Lord of the Flies” - which refers to Satan and has great repercussions, but that is not the point being made here. Rather, it is that we are all in need of therapy for the trauma of life. For this therapy to work, we need both openness and trust. The trick lies, then, in finding the right lighthouse keeper in whom we can finally trust, who can lead us out of our trauma and back to the mainland.
RSS Feed