Trauma

Us, and Them

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“What does your brain need to function normally? Beyond the nutrients from the food you eat, beyond the oxygen you breathe, beyond the water you drink, there’s something else, something equally as important: it needs other people. Normal brain function depends on the social web around us. Our neurons require other people’s neurons to thrive and survive.”

David Eagleman, The Brain; Chapter introduction to Chapter 5: Do I Need You?; 2015; New York

Unnoticed by many, neuroscience, the science of the brain, has made progress over the past ten to twenty years which one can perhaps only describe with moving from the medieval ages to enlightenment with lightning speed. We research on the brain since hundreds of years, may be even much more, if all early attempts to understand it are included. We do apply modern methods of science since a century, or more. But it is the cutting edge result of research of the past fifteen years which makes us say that we are entering a new phase of understanding who we are; who we are not; what is constituting our conscious self awareness; and how this is embedded into a much larger context of the subconscious which we mostly are not aware of. But even more, modern neuroscience begins to help us understanding to which extent we need the interrelationship between us and others, and what it means for the “self”, and what it does to us. The borderline between the self and the outer world becomes more and more porous. We are all more interconnected with the entire world than the concept of an independent self makes us want to believe.

David Eagleman’s book is based on a PBS series “The Brain”. These six episodes are the most awesome piece of popular science made public I have come across in many years. It should be viewed in schools and universities, and everybody can, you can get it in the iTunes Store, for example.

In Chapter 5, findings of neuroscience are demonstrated that connect to my personal understanding of the effects of trauma, how it affects me, and people like me. Chapter 5 also includes important clues to understanding societal interactions of many people that lead to violence, destruction, xenophobia, and genocide. As Eagleman says, brains have traditionally been studied in isolation, but that approach overlooks the effect that an enormous amount of brain circuitry has to do with other brains. Our brains are primed for social interaction, from a moment on we appear to not have memories of, from the moment we are given birth. Babies at the age of one year have a complex capacity to differentiate between trustworthy action and the opposite, before even understanding language.

The self does not exist in isolation to others. We know that, we would agree to it, and perhaps the extent to which this is true can be seen when looking at persons who suffer from having less ability to empathize, such as persons suffering from autism, or from sociopathy. Both are deficiencies in complex interaction of subsystems of the brain circuitry. By no means they are moral or behavioral deficiencies, emerging understanding goes deep into the knowledge of the brain being interconnected with other brains.

The understanding of how individuals relate to Ingroups and Outgroups, to groups to which we belong, and to groups we feel we do not belong, it all is affected by how the trillions of synapses of a brain relate to other sets of trillions of synapses, and billions of those. It is kind of a challenge to accept that interdependency with others is not something that we decide, but that is built into our fabric on most fundamental levels. To those who are challenged by the thought that we depend on entities outside of ourselves on a deep level, here is another thought: The average adult human being is carrying several pounds of living matter that appear to not belong to the body itself, with entirely different DNA, living in co-existence, sometimes parasitic, sometimes in symbiosis: Bacteria. But it goes beyond: Take these bacteria away from your body, and you will die in a very short while. You can simply not exist without of these billions and billions of other living beings inside yourself.

The same goes with empathy. Empathy is a fundamental mechanism of the brain, and it is activating the same brain circuitry that is activated when you feel pain. Especially when you are being left out: If people do not cooperate with you, but leave you out, fMRI scans show that the parts of your pain fire up which also light up when you feel physical pain.

So, belonging to a group makes us feel good. Meaning that the question arises how we relate to people which we wold categorize as not being part of the groups we feel good with.

It is here where Eagleman’s book is becoming so fascinating read for me: He is referring to the genocide in Rwanda, the genocide in Srebrenica, and also making it clear that so many more of these situations exist, like the killing of millions of Armenians by Turks in 1915, or the Nazi Holocaust, and much more. All of a sudden, when reading his book, I am back in Sarajevo: Eagleman interviews Hasan Nuhanovic, who worked as a translator in the United Nation’s mission UNPROFOR on the compound where his family was seeking refuge. He survived, and he lost his family, when the UN commander decided to open the gates, exposing 8.000 Bosniak Muslims to the hellhounds of Ratko Mladic’s genocidaires. I know Hasan personally, I employed him in the European  Union Police Mission, we revered him, and we made it a regular habit to have him educating the International Community about the consequences of the genocide in Srebrenica.

Eagleman tries to understand what transforms neighbors into killers. Individuals who have been in more or less peaceful coexistence for a lifetime, and their ancestors since hundreds of years, they seem to be able to mutate into monstrous torturers and killers within a brief moment.

I would not conclude, from what I understand, that the reasons for this are entirely understood. But neuroscience offers clues: Empathy works with Ingroups. The brain shows visibly less activity in circuitry related to empathy when considering somebody to be part of an Outgroup. As he says, these areas of the brain become short-circuited, they do not longer participate in decision making. Empathy disengages. We don’t care any more. To me, this is the entry point into dehumanization.

Read, or watch, his experiment: Brain scan people who see pictures of hands being stabbed by a needle, and how the brain reacts in case you tell the person that this hand belongs to somebody in a group you identify with, or not. The same picture can create either a firestorm in the brain, let me say, in case you are a Democrat and you are being told that this person is a Democrat, or a Republican. Or, a German, and a migrant from North Africa. Or a Christian, and a Muslim. Depending on which side you belong to, your brain reacts different to the same picture, depending on how you label the picture: For example, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the brain is engaging differently in case we are thinking of other people, or inanimate objects: People looking at pictures of homeless people show much less activity in the mPFC compared to pictures of people they relate to. Dehumanization, made visible on a brain scanner.

Now, I am leaving the narrative of Eagleman’s book of my beautiful city Sarajevo to the reader. But I do ask how this translates into contemporary empathy with people suffering in conflict areas, and when they arrive, millions of them, having successfully escaped, at the borders of, say, European Union States.

Think about it: Your reaction to a picture of a child found on a shore, drowned because the boat overloaded with refugees capsized, it creates viral replication in social media, storms of empathy flare up, because you can identify: A child is a child. But if you see troves of people waiting at some European countries border, your reaction might be different, though the only real difference is that these people did not drown, they made it. Empathy makes all the difference in your reaction.

I want to leave it there for today. My thoughts go deeper, naturally I am trying to find an entry point into the xenophobic elements of a discussion that also has justified elements, such as respect of migrants for societal values in those countries welcoming migrants escaping from horrible violence, and the way how the social networks in these societies appear to explode with fear, and hate.

Education is the key. The great simplifiers, those who trumpet their rallying sounds for hate from the TV stations and the Internet, they need to be countered by an educated debate. Fair, tough with those who disrespect values, but also tolerant with those who may want to learn values they have never been exposed to before.

How can I blame somebody who, from the moment of being a baby on, has been either taught male supremacy, or female subordination? We all learn from copying what our parents and caregivers tell us.

But we can engage in discussions, learn, and help in learning.

On Trauma, Children, and Societies

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I introduced three categories of conditions in my previous blog entry (Trauma; addictive/compulsive behaviour; certain personality disorders), and three general categories of individuals who draw their appreciation of these conditions from their specific ability or inability to relate to them. Members of these categories either have never experienced one of these conditions personally, or they suffer from one or several of them, or they are in a state that I have named recovery.

It is possible that such a systematisation only fits a cultural context of Western societies. The perception of reality by a self-aware mind happens within a cultural context, though it may be influenced by some genetic predispositions. For sure the main influence is happening throughout childhood and adolescence, in every specific society. Literally all aspects of what an individual learns about where he or she belongs, what defines the identity within a group, a society, a culture, a belief system, a system of faith, it begins with education by parents and caregivers.

In my attempt to describe the context of trauma and my line of work, I have to appreciate that. I have to acknowledge that my approach; my way relating to it; my way of empathising with, for example, victims of trauma; my ideas about which impact the consequences of trauma have; my ideas how to assist in healing trauma; that all this happens within the framework of the societies of the type I grew up in. My appreciation is formed through education, through science, through value systems and belief systems to which I have been exposed, which form the Western world in which I live.

Let me explain this with a little example:

I came across an interesting statement (look here for one of several references) on the fundamental cultural context of healing, and assistance to it. In this piece, a Rwandan genocide survivor makes reference to healthcare professionals from Western countries, attempting to apply a Western approach to healing:

“You know, we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide, and we had to ask some of them to leave…They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun like what you’re describing – which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed and you’re low and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out of you again. Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country.”

Trauma experienced by adults is a well explored issue which has made it into public awareness. Scientific research has made tremendous progress in understanding how trauma impacts on the brain. The long form of the acronym PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is known by many. People share at least a little conceptual understanding. You and I have experiences within our families and networks of friends about the impact of trauma. My grand uncle never spoke about his experiences as a soldier during the most brutal World War I. My former father in law never ever opened up on his experiences during the Nazi Regime. Both of them were visibly and deeply affected.

I want to focus on what trauma does to young children: The impact of trauma on a child in its early or later stages of development is tremendous, in any society. What I say is that the way how societies deal with trauma may be specific to the societal and cultural context, but the fact that trauma happens to children, and has a deep effect, is common to all individuals in all societies who face violence and abuse of children, and their caregivers. Therefore, every society affected by conflict needs to address these effects of trauma in order to move on, and this way is specific to every society in question. There may be an universal framework for healing, but I suspect it is limited.

My personal experience would indicate that we empathise with the impact of violence and trauma on children, but we stop short from real acknowledgement of its lifelong consequences: It appears to me that we often deny, or disregard, its impact. This impact on life when somebody is exposed to early trauma is much more fundamental, and to some considerable extent unalterable. It may be that, in a mainstream discussion, we feel empathy, and pity, but we may wrongly expect that the child has to move on, on its way into adulthood, and as an adult.

As a matter of fact, no single child can do that.

Trauma requires support for healing. Any seriously traumatised individual is unlikely to undo the impact of trauma without support, and this is especially true for children. A child literally has no single tool which would enable it to support his or her own healing. A child completely depends on the support of caregivers. If these caregivers then are affected by massive trauma as well, they are becoming dysfunctional in many ways that affect their nurturing and educating children. Consequently, the child will almost certainly grow up becoming a dysfunctional adult. It’s a double whammy: Suffering from own trauma, being raised by traumatised caregivers. In societies that are affected by massive violence, including acts of genocide, including systematic use of rape and violence against women, children, and other vulnerable groups, as an instrument of conflict and war, this has catastrophic consequences: These societies form, from individual wounds, common wounds. These common wounds persist, their results are visible in generations of that society to come. They, in my experience, form the foundation for future relapse into violence.

No matter which society, no matter which culture, children are born with a clean slate. Certainly, genetic predisposition impacts on how children develop, but newborn always are, as Pia Mellody⁠1 describes it, valuable, vulnerable, imperfect, dependent, and immature. This is just one attempt to frame the initial condition a child is in, but it appears to be useful to me.

If you look at these categories, nurturing and raising of children means to assist them in moving from this highly dependent initial condition into interdependent adulthood. “Interdependent” means that an individual is able to function within a societal context, and doing so in a more or less healthy way. “Living healthy” always relates to quite some extent to what a peer group would generally consider to be appropriate.

Like all mammals, we learn what we need to know, how to be, how to act as an adult from caregivers. Instincts and genetically coded behaviour exist, but every mammal learns how to interact, how to hunt, how to relate to a peer group, through nurturing, play, and education. In our human case, it requires, give or take, twenty years. I believe that even in societies in which children take on roles that we, in Western societies, would consider appropriate only much later, this profoundly biological, psychological, and social, process simply requires that much time. No matter whether a society marries a girl early on to an adult, no matter from when on a child begins to take family responsibilities, or has to begin to work: Forming the adult self, able to function in any society in an appropriate interdependent manner, in our human case it takes time.

In a Western context, there is established clinical and therapeutic evidence for a group of symptoms that follow protracted and/or severe forms of abuse in childhood (which impact on a child as trauma). Citing one of many authors on this, Pia Mellody⁠2, I am not motivated by the topic of her specific book, a phenomenon called “codependence”, but by it’s healthy opposite, what I referred to above as “interdependence”. In her vast work, Pia Mellody identifies the following conditions as a consequence of the inability or impairment of an individual to act in an interdependent (healthy) way: (1) Negative control; (2) Resentment; (3) Distorted, or nonexistent spirituality; (4) Avoiding reality; (5) Impaired ability to sustain intimacy. Her work represents important experience in understanding a fundamental connection between childhood trauma, through physical or emotional abuse, and, what she calls “less than nurturing” education.

With more easy, but blunt words: Dysfunctional parents, unwillingly and often unknowingly, create dysfunctional children, who grow up becoming dysfunctional adults. So, how does a surviving parent, traumatised by the loss of loved ones, and traumatised as a victim of violence and abuse, educate a child in a way that this child becomes an interdependent healthy member of the society? How more complicated is this, if also that child itself has been subjected to unimaginable violence? I will write about sexual and gender based violence, or about slavery, and forming children into child soldiers, in later articles. But how does a child with such trauma wounds grow up, being taken care of by caregivers who struggle with recovery from trauma themselves?

Clinical experience in our Western societies establishes in almost all cases of childhood trauma a direct link into dysfunctional patterns including compulsive/addictive abuse of substances and/or behaviour, or developing physical or mental forms of illness. Cases of widespread abuse of alcohol or substances through the loss of cultural context, identification, collective low self-esteem, in subjugated minority communities come to my mind. I remember my knowledge about Australian aborigines, for example, but also the dysfunctional behaviour in ghetto communities that we all deal with as police officers. We allow, create, or accept, unhealthy conditions in minorities, and/or ghettos, and then we blame the members of those groups for the dysfunctional behaviour which is an inevitable consequence.

But aside that common experience, which has very concrete consequences for the community-oriented policing work in all our countries, in my line of work I see the huge numbers of victims of horrible violence, children and caregivers, after conflict, and genocide.

Which sets the stage for case studies, but before that, within a next instalment, for further quantification and qualification of the violence that is part of contemporary conflicts. I have case studies including my own experiences, like in Bosnia & Herzegovina on my mind, or, for example, Rwanda. But also case studies of ghetto situations, in countries of the Western world.

Now, finishing with a book recommendation. Read the memoirs of a child soldier. It is heartening, but it will go under your skin: “A Long Way Gone⁠3: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah”.

From Amazon’s book page: “This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

“My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.

‘Why did you leave Sierra Leone?’

‘Because there is a war.’

‘You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?’

‘Yes, all the time.’

‘Cool.’

I smile a little.

‘You should tell us about it sometime.’

‘Yes, sometime.'”

1 Pia Mellody, With Andrea Wells Miller and J. Keith Miller; “Facing Codependence”, HarperCollins, 1989 and 2003, New York, ISBN 978-0-06-250589-7, page 63

2 Ibid, page 45

3 Beah, Ishmael (2006). A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Sarah Crichton Books

On Trauma and Societies

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This entry amends and deepens my earlier article “Trauma – An Entry Point”. So some is a repetition, but put into a larger context.

There is a group of conditions with damaging impact which’s members, at first sight, may seem disparate. These conditions fundamentally affect development, personality, and behavior, and impact on forming relationships. Scientific understanding of these conditions, and what they do to individuals, has made significant progress over the past decades.

However, in my experience they also impact on communities, and societies, especially when some of them occur on a large scale, to a huge number of members of a society, as a consequence of violent conflict.

To my knowledge, this area is less charted, in psychology, and in sociology.

The three conditions are:

(1) Trauma;

(2) Compulsive behavior and addiction and their interrelationship; and

(3) Certain personality disorders which, at least, seem to occur as a consequence of trauma especially when exposed to it at an early stage of life.

These conditions can be examined using a multidisciplinary approach including genetic, neuronal, biochemical and environmental/behavioral  sciences. This is especially useful when it comes to the various degrees of their influencing each other and working together.

These conditions, in principle, can be seen in any living organism, at least of some complexity, and to varying degrees, again depending on the complexity of the organism in question.

We all know the story of the dog where it’s owner knows or suspects that the animal has been abused, say, the dog was rescued from being chained and beaten frequently, for example. We immediately see the impact, some animals are extremely anxious, others may be aggressive and can not be held around children. I have not seen anyone who does not understand the causal consequence between the abuse and the behavior of an animal. The dog may even have been adopted for reasons including pity. Animal adoption online markets are full of narratives about abuse.

My experience with human beings who have experienced trauma, especially early trauma, is different. The layers of human development from child to adult, and within an adult’s life, seem to make the causal context less visible. I may hear on a party sentences like “Our new dog was clearly abused as a puppy”. I can neither remember or imagine a similar easygoing discussion about a human being. These conversations are very different.

It appears to me that we can readily appreciate the impact of violence on an animal, but my personal experience with the set of reactions when confronted with somebody who has been subjected to violence, to trauma, to injustice on an extraordinary scale, is different. The scale of reactions includes indifference, disinterested attitude, or inability to appropriately interact with such an individual. Reactions can include gossip to third people like “He or she should get over it”, they can, not only in extreme cases, even outright victimize and traumatize this individual again.

Why? I struggle to come up with a comprehensive answer, but to me it stands out that the topic of abuse appears to be a societal taboo: Victims, if they can remember that they were abused, regularly don’t talk. The reasons include shame, and alienation by others. Every police officer knows (or should…) the term “secondary victimization”. It happens, for example, to rape victims, through the sometimes helpless, sometimes outright malicious, and always inappropriate reactions of family, friends, law enforcement, and justice.

Moreover, in my experience the reactions to human abuse appear to include other elements which make the consequences so difficult to see, and to deal with. They include uneducation, sometimes almost medieval belief, and disinterest. As an example, I take a sentence many of us have heard all too often: “A slap does not harm a child, it’s good for the child”.

Despite well-documented negative impact on the development of children, this belief is very common. To my disbelief, I had even to learn that some State legislation in the U.S. still allows physical punishment of children. Just read this one.

I do believe that massive experience of violence, and especially sexual and gender based violence on a mass scale which occurs in conflict, not seldom deliberately used as a weapon of war, of individual and societal destruction, leads to the occurrence of all three conditions on a scale that affects that societies’ ability to move on, and to reconcile, or not. I have made practical experience of that everywhere where I have worked.

Our ability to appreciate these phenomena and to relate to the behavioral consequences of their existence in an individual is radically different, in my view, within the three following groups, which I introduced in my first article:

(A) Those who don’t have one or several of these conditions;

(B) Those who have, and often don’t know; and

(C) Those who recover from one or several of these conditions, and/or integrate the knowledge of their partly unalterable consequences consciously into their lifes.

These three constituencies mix and may communicate about these issues on basis of a vastly different understanding:

The person who is not affected (A) has limitations to relate, and thus, to understand. Relapse into addictive behavior, compulsive disorders, anxieties, anorexic behavior, just to name very few, appear to be alien to these persons. They have genuine difficulties grappling with relating to why this is happening, beyond an intellectual level. Read “Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent in Plain Sight” by M.E. Thomas. Try to relate to her narrative, assuming you, the reader, are not a sociopath. It’s really demonstrating the case.

The person who is affected (B), does not, at least fully, know and/or is in a condition excluding understanding, through complex denial mechanisms. This person is genuinely unhappy and may even be ready to admit that, but understanding does not suffice and denial adds. The denial can be visible to (A), but that person has often no idea what this denial really means, and how it works. Often, a person (A) concludes that a person (B) is weak. An addict has character deficiencies, full stop. A traumatized abuse victim is weak, he or she should get over it. Full stop. A personality disorder, like, let me just say, frequent panic attacks and inability to be with other people, may establish pity at best. But that person is weak, full stop.

In order to appreciate my entry point into this discussion, read, for example, the definition of the American Society for Addiction Medicine ASAM. According to this definition, based on what we now know through sophisticated science, addiction is a brain disease. I will come to addiction much later, the point here is “brain disease”. The very same way, trauma is a wound inflicted on the brain.

Whilst we may talk about brain injuries and diseases on a neuronal level in educated academic discussions, my impression is that much of society approaches these conditions including from a perspective treating them as character deficiencies.

The person who recovers (C), increasingly understands, as his or her recovery progresses. Recovery is hard work. Thus, the recovering person develops an intimate understanding of what happened, and why.

It is from this perspective that I see and want to examine the impact on societies where large groups of individuals are victimized. Understanding the impact helps finding better ways to help addressing it, increasing the ability of a society to reconcile.

Because if there is no reconciliation, there is high likelihood of relapse into new conflict.

For further reading, here is just one personal account. I will use some more in future entries.

Trauma – An Entry Point

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So far, I have been writing about peace, justice, and security. This blog is also about conflict, trauma and reconciliation. And frankly, it is perhaps the biggest unexplored land that I need to enter, to cross, and attempt to map. Trauma is one of the most challenging terms I have ever been dealing with.

My knowledge about trauma is growing. As I write, I also contribute with this to my own recovery from trauma. So this will be part of a healing process, quite frankly. As this is a public blog, there only will be a very limited disclosure.

I am so aware of how difficult it is, in general, to understand what trauma does to an individual, and in cases of massive trauma by conflict, to communities and societies. From what I am learning and researching, the effects of trauma on societies may be better explored than methods to address recovery from trauma on a societal level.

In my professional experience, this recovery process appears to be a crucial factor for reconciliation in a society that has experienced conflict. I will try, how many blog entries down the road, and repeatedly, to explain and to reflect on supporting methods for recovery from individual trauma. My feeling since a while is that there is much potential for finding better ways to support the process of societies that have been traumatized through conflict, on their way towards reconciliation.

Because if they don’t, the common experience in my line of work is that these societies have a higher chance to relapse into conflict. History is full of proof for this.

Thinking about how to find the best common understanding for this topic, I want to note that there are several categories of individuals who need, when reading about trauma, to understand that their own experience with it massively defines their way, and even their ability, to relate to what I am going to write.

In a simplification, three groups stand out to me:

(1) Those who are lucky that they grew up without being subjected to their own trauma;

(2) Those who are trauma victims and don’t know;

(3) Those who actively recover, using a large variety of tools for it, based on what science learns about trauma, and on recovery tools that work.

Each of these groups have a massively different ability to understand the notion of trauma, with some similarities between the first two groups. The best understanding might be within the third group, to which I belong. Thus, I also know from my own experience how challenging it may be for those who understand trauma better, to explain it, on basis of their own experience. Because this group is labeled in different ways, there often is the complete absence of understanding what suffering from trauma means. Lifelong. Reactions go across the whole spectrum, including muted silence and aversion, to ridiculing, and moral judgement.

Which leads me to my second last general comment: I would believe that as of today, many who deal with trauma and its consequences would agree to that a multidisciplinary explanatory model and recovery approach is necessary. Explaining the mechanism of traumatization, and the approaches to healing, went through a huge scientific learning process over the past few decades. It is still ongoing, but there truly is exciting progress. Thats why both the knowledge about trauma and its effects, but also what trauma means for communities and societies at large, are so incredibly relevant and, perhaps, insufficiently explored and understood. My suspicion is that, as a result, we struggle with finding more effective methods of assisting recovering societies, in my line of work.

My last general comment: Science is knowledge, is enlightenment, is allowing humanity to develop tools. The opposite is the darkness that we often associate with the medieval ages. Believe me, from my viewpoint, which is supporting science, we are not out of the woods of the medieval ages yet. Specifically when it comes to contemporary understanding of behavior, learning, nurturing, and abuse in all its various forms, I see the medieval ages in full existence. The result is an uninformed approach of morality, and it has a huge impact in societies which believe that they are educated, and believing that the darkness of not knowing is just for labeling “elsewhere”.

I will give examples.

Here is one for starters: Follow these two links below. I may continue to work myself into the issue of trauma from various viewpoints, using these examples, and others. I deliberately refrain from judging the extremely different events that are reported in these articles too much, except that they both upset me equally:

During the same 30 minutes whilst riding on a train home, I read the news about that Boko Haram, in their most recent attack, killed hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people, with utmost cruelty, and for sure with what always comes with it: torture, and rape, unspeakable horror and suffering. Then I read about a father in Florida calling the cops for witnessing his punishing his 12-year-old daughter with slaps on her buttocks.

The common denominator for my later dissection: Trauma. And whilst All here would agree that Boko Haram’s actions are coming from Hell, yet there is a common understanding that physical abuse of children is justified for “educational” purposes. Even more, the notion I grew up with, including the sentence “A little slapping is healthy for children”, this notion is more widespread than I would have hoped, after so many decades of educational progress. It is truly medieval, as one can see, it’s still the law, even in some Southern parts of the United States.

So, the challenge is education about the effects of trauma. I will attempt to contribute.

Here are the links.

Dad Calls Cops to Watch Him Spank 12-Year-Old Daughter

http://gawker.com/dad-calls-cops-to-watch-him-spank-12-year-old-daughter-1677493594

Deadliest-Ever Boko Haram Raid Leaves Hundreds Dead in Nigeria: Reports

http://gawker.com/deadliest-ever-boko-haram-raid-leaves-hundreds-dead-in-1678538005

I really can not say: Enjoy reading…