Probably like many people, I seem to have experienced a whole range of emotions over the past few days: anger, outrage, fear, despondency, warmth (towards the #riotcleanup groups), more fear, fascination, interest, sadness, confusion and so on. This morning I went and walked on the downs in Bristol and felt overwhelmed by the simple fact that most of the time as a society we operate so well; we manage complex tasks such as driving confident that others for the most part will obey the rules and that we will all be safe, we shop in supermarkets with politeness recognising the necessity of paying for what we get, we have picnics on the downs with our children confident that for the most part others will respect our space and right to enjoy ourselves, we pay our bills and our taxes… yes of course from time to time we will try and diminish these as much as possible, but all in all we obey the conventions necessary for the smooth running of an extremely complex system… our society. When such things happen as we have experienced over the last few days perhaps it brings home to us at the same time the fragility of our society… and its robustness. Many more people came out on Tuesday morning to help with the cleanup operation than were doing the violence and looting the night before. We have no choice but to protect our society… and in time most of those who were involved in the violence and looting will realise this too.
There was a very interesting piece in the Times by Dr Malcolm Cross (Reader in Psychology at City University London) entitled Convenience Crimes in the Age of Enlightenment (page 9) in which he discussed ‘group action’ and how it gives confidence:
“Group action…connects you so strongly with one set of people that you stop thinking about how your actions affect others. The group gives you confidence in your actions.” (Cross, The Times, 2011)
This concurs so well with Hellinger’s ideas about conscience and belonging and the forces at play:
“We experience these effects quite clearly. When we follow the requirements of the group we feel, as Hellinger has put it, innocent, meaning safe and secure in our belonging.” (Broughton, 2010)
and:
“Our sense of belonging is a most primitive primary need and comes into being through the intimate process of bonding. As a baby and young child we would not survive outside of a family group; our belonging helps to guarantee our survival.” (ibid)
Bringing in Franz Ruppert’s notion of symbiotic trauma, this translates into a continual need to feel safe within a certain group-style… and in my view this will follow through whatever the group identity/focus.
I read in one news report that some of the arrested, when brought to court, were not kids, but older and with good jobs; one was a primary school worker of 31; another a chef in a restaurant. The report also said that some of the arrested seemed confused and bemused that they could have done these things, almost as if they had come out of some kind of strange dream. I also read about bystanders who got involved in the looting after the kids had broken into stores, and people encouraging the kids from upstairs windows. One recording was of some people watching and discussing whether to go and join in and take some things. Why would ordinary people who every day manage their lives with honesty and integrity feel drawn in like this?
Again, I think that Ruppert’s ideas about symbiotic and trans-generational trauma help us with this.
To track the process of symbiotic trauma:
- Someone in a family experiences a traumatic event, causing their psyche to split, rendering the trauma experience unconscious and essentially locked away, but vulnerable to re-stimulation.
- This person, let’s say a woman (but could equally well be a man), then has a child. Because her psyche is split and the trauma feelings of helplessnes, terror, extreme grief, are split off (but nevertheless easily re-activated) her ability to connect with her child is affected.
- This child, in order to survive¹, must connect physically and emotionally to another, and tries to connect with his mother.
- This attempt at connection between mother and child stimulates feelings in the mother that re-activate the unconscious trauma feelings… so that love comes combined and confused for example with terror, and in order to protect herself from these uncomfortable feelings the mother dissociates in whatever way she has developed in order to survive and not feel these terrifying feelings.
- The child then can only connect with confused feelings of love/terror, and with a somewhat dissociated mother.
- This disrupted connection is in itself a trauma for the child, because his very survival depends on the connection and so every instance of dissociated and turbulent connection is experienced as a threat to his survival.
- In order to manage this the child also splits, rendering all his terrifying feelings of existential threat to his unconscious and employing dissociative strategies himself.
- This sets the parameters for all later relational experiences: all relationships involve a mix of emotions, re-stimulating the original terror of existential threat and will involve dissociation as a means of managing.
Franz has said (verbal communication) that in order to be a perpetrator the person must be traumatised. Put another way, if I were not dissociated to some degree it would be absolutely impossible for me to hurt another… we can only hurt others if we do not fully see them, and we don’t see the other when we are dissociated.
I have been reading a book called On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War, by Lt Col Dave Grossman. According to him, over the millenia of war-making up to the present day, again and again references have been made in the relevant literature of human’s dislike and avoidance of killing other humans:
…throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, [combatants] have found themselves to be unable to kill. (Grossman, 2009)
Grossman quotes many military texts from over the last century, most of them involved in trying to understand better how to make combatants more efficient at killing. The statistics he quote are fairly consistent over these studies and come at a average 15 to 20 percent hit ratio, regardless of how close the shots are fired, compared with the amount of artillery fired. He concludes (as have others writing in the field) that, like animals, in humans the incidence of killing of our own species is very low. Most of us cannot do it. In fact it seems so that combatants in war are more likely to allow themselves to be killed rather than kill another. Of course this is a major concern for the military and has engaged them over the centuries in understanding ways of overriding this. Drilling was one way… this idea being that if a soldier was sufficiently ‘drilled’ he would act in real combat as trained, but this had very limited success.
One way, and the way that it would seem the military currently favour, is to traumatise the combatants in training (reference Jonathan Shay’s book, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, 2002). This ties in with Franz’s idea… ie, in order to kill/hurt another one must be dissociated to a degree by traumatisation.
So, to follow through on the central theme of this post, in order to succumb to group violence one joins with a collective dissociation… from one’s own inner sense of normal morality and reality, which then, when one comes back to oneself, causes one to feel shock and bemusement at what one has done.
I had a lovely walk on the Downs surrounded by people getting on with their ordinary lives.
This piece probably needs some work… but in essence its what it is.
¹ Limbic regulation, we now know, is crucial for the survival of the new-born infant. The mother’s physiological and psychological being in the beginning regulate the child’s, keeping him alive. The child’s ability to regulate his internal physiology is virtually nil at the beginning of life, and his system is literally regulated by his mother’s, and the state of his mothers physiology influences the efficiency of his. (A General Theory of Love, T. Lewis, F. Amini, R. Lannon, 2001)