You would also recall that those adaptation philosophies, thoughts and behaviors are considered from the ETM paradigm's view to be valuable because they help trauma affected people to survive immediately following the traumatic event. But the protections are considered to be less valuable when they divert the trauma-affected individual and system from resolving the trauma (reversing the etiology).
In addition, when the adaptations function contrary to individual and social norms, the protective processes become thought and behavioral problems in and of themselves. They are called symptoms of psychological disorder. And in the case of psychological trauma, they characterize post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The trauma etiology-caused ever-continuing need for adaptation (and traumatic symptoms of PTSD) can eventually interfere with how people affected by trauma learn from traumatic events, and particularly how they learn how to prevent traumatic events of a like kind that are otherwise preventable. That interference can be called "trauma-induced dislearning." It means that intellectual activities (by trauma affected people) organize information so that learning cannot occur.
In this organization, the protections require that information pertaining to the trauma and its causal event be assimilated and analyzed in a manner that does not interfere with the protection and etiology-maintenance relationship. Dislearning occurs as the requirements of that relationship maintain a trauma-affected individual's cognitive focus on everything except the sources of the trauma, including the circumstances indirectly contributing to or directly causing the event. Apparently, to do so (focus on the indirect and direct causes) would evoke realization of the etiology, which could then lead to its address, even reversal.
Cyclically and paradoxically, the etiology's reversal is not allowed by the protections because the etiology underpins the need for their existences. And while the etiology exists, so must the protections. They are, therefore, having the effect of preventing the trauma-affected learning activity from discovering the sources or causes of trauma and from learning how to prevent (where preventable) the events that cause the trauma.
For an example of how the trauma dislearning affects individuals, one can look to those who are closely related to chemically dependent people. Pathological chemical (drug and alcohol) use causes bizarre behavior. It creates psychological trauma etiology for the family members (and chemically dependent person). The etiology (contradicted identity and loss) is protected by the family members' denial (minimization, rationalization, forgetting, adaptation of drug use supporting philosophies, etc.) of the bizarre behaviors. And denial of the damaging behaviors is supported by denial of the pathological use, the source of the behavior. Family members can't even begin to learn how to solve behavioral problems stemming from pathological use until it can be identified as a source of the problem.
Protective philosophies, thoughts and behaviors can also cause more etiology when they contradict pre trauma values, beliefs, images and other realities, especially those values, etc. related to honest functioning. For example, where an individual believes that he or she should live in a manner that is truthful to one's self and others, attempts to deny the etiology's existence contradicts that basic belief. Consequently, protective philosophies originally helpful during immediate survival eventually have the opposite effect of their intent to do good: stop the hurt. Through denial of the etiology, they continue the repeating and apparently immutable assault on identity. The assault undermines identity; its erosion then cyclically strengthens the need for ever stronger and simultaneously dislearning effects.
This difficult individual trauma etiology reversal process can be made easier within a system if it provides the trauma-affected individual with a considerable amount of existentially-based support for the reversal activity. "Existentially-based support" has two important meanings for etiology reversal. One is that the system has the capacity to facilitate, to make the passage with, to share, or to otherwise reflect back to the trauma-affected individual his or her experience of the trauma-induced extinction of identity. The other is that the system can provide this kind of caring without attempting to engage the etiology's symptomatic behaviors; for example, the support does not judge, criticize, correct, or try to change the behaviors created by the etiology.
When a system's members are made up of trauma-affected people who still maintain trauma etiology in memory, that presence, combined with the protections and etiology-maintenance relationships attending trauma-affected individuals (and reviewed in the previous subsection), cannot allow the existentially-based experience of the extinction process otherwise required to reverse individual etiology created by new events occurring within the system. That new etiology's reversal would evoke experience of past trauma etiology retained by the system's helping members. Such members then are left only with behavioral modification alternatives to system interaction. That is, the system's trauma affected (retaining repressed and denied etiology) members can only respond to symptomatic behaviors by trying to correct them as they function contrary to systemic behavioral standards.
Thus, trauma-affected systems are faced with the same learning problems that confront trauma-affected individuals. Preventing address of individual (and thus systemic) trauma etiology through the use of adaptive philosophies, other thoughts and behaviorial modification techniques effectively requires that the system not focus upon the sources or the causes of the trauma, least those focuses evoke the experience of repressed individual and systemic etiologies. Precluding focus upon the sources and causes of (otherwise preventable) traumatic events simultaneously stops the system from learning how to prevent such events.
Simplifying, trauma-affected helpers (where the trauma etiology has not been reversed) comprising a system may not allow resolution of new trauma within that system for its individual members because the resolution activity undercuts protective individual and systemic defenses. Disallowance of the trauma's resolution interferes with the system's capacity to learn how to prevent preventable traumatic events.
From the view of the etiotropic violent crime prevention model, the general answer to that question is that all of these cultures - systems have coordinated and still coordinate their learning activities through protective philosophies, methods, thoughts and behaviors that prevent etiology's discovery, understanding, and reversal. Subsquently, cultural learning becomes cultural dislearning as denial of the etiology results in the culture's inability to focus on the sources of the criminal violence-caused trauma. Such focuses would evoke the trauma's etiology. And failure to make that focus prevents the culture from learning how to prevent future criminal violence-caused trauma of a like kind.
For a more specific answer to the question "How have cultures failed to prevent violent crime for over 2000 years?", we can look to the specific philosophies, etc. that have constituted and still make up today these cultures' trauma adaptive social norms and mores. Although there are apparently myriad manifestions, three adaptive philosophies and attendant methods predominate. They are Stoicism, Behaviorism, and Determinism.
Resist extinction, prolong etiology, don't learn the extent of the damage to identity. Accordingly, it is and must be continuously minimized. Minimizing it minimizes the event and all factors leading to it. Subseqently, the culture's corrective responses are understated.
To take one example, a violent crime like rape occurs. The experience of the damage to the rape victim's identity is always overwhelming. But because the culture uses Stoicism, the not understood victim's experience is covered over, minimized, denied. In the culture that attempts to make punishment fit the crime, because Stoicism minimizes the victim's experience, it cannot be understood by the culture. Both the crime and punishment are minimized. The rapist only loses his freedom for certain periods.
The culture that would address trauma etiology directly and that would subsequently completely understand through shared experience the rape-induced destruction of identity, could and would without philosophical impediment more than likely evaluate all of the circumstances that would create the rapist, whether biological or social, and address them directly. Rape-induced destruction to identity is so individually catastrophic that a culture that fully understood the experience through participation in or knowledge of the reversal of the etiology would learn how to prevent additional rape, not just temporarilly restrict rapists' freedoms after the've inflicted their damages.
From this paradigm, instead of the extinction of identity being viewed as a cause of aberrant behaviors, it can only be considered an excuse for behaviors the behavioralists are trying to control - stop. Thereafter, when the trauma etiology is denied, it can continue to foster the same kinds of apparently aberrant behaviors despite the behavioralists' efforts to stop and prevent them. Worse, if it were true that trauma etiology fosters expression of violent symptoms in some people, then the Behaviorism paradigm that denies, and even more emphatically disallows recognition of, trauma etiology, prevents learning about and then providing remedies for the direct causes of additional criminal violence.
From this view, Behaviorism assures continuing presentation of the same destructive symptomatologies that the philosophy and its methodology are supposed to help the culture to stop. The culture learns futility instead of success. The futillity culminates in the creation of additional management philosophies that blame the population (being managed) instead of the paradoxically impaired behavioral management methodology.
When they are caused by violent crime, Determinism would hope to prevent such crime by helping a culture's victims to learn to avoid it in the future. Hence, the responsibility for preventing violence within that management model belongs to the crimes' victims. Because the philosophy requires that a violent crime occur before a person can learn to avoid future episodes, the culture that uses Determinism is required to not learn what caused the event in the first place so that the trauma would continue to provide more victims for more learning experiences.
Determinism also supports denial of the trauma's etiology. That is, because determinists believe that the trauma-affected person attracted into the criminal violence, it was chosen. If it were chosen, then there can be no contradiction to identity, as the event is believed to be commensurate with the values, beliefs, images and realities that make up the identity. No contradictions to identity, no trauma etiology.
Blaming victims with Determinism doesn't only hurt victims more than they have already been harmed. The victim - blaming philosophy exculpates both event perpetrators and the elements of the culture's management that would allow the event in the first place, and that would revictimize the trauma-affected individual in the second place.
The way that cultures blame battered spouses provides an example of how Determinism theory contributes to a culture's dislearning. Determinism says that the beaten spouse chooses the assault(s) because the beating satisfies the pathology that requires the individual seek out someone who would provide the beating. Determinists, because their philosophy does not provide for recognition of externally implanted trauma etiology and its retension by trauma-impaired individual learning (trauma-induced dislearning), believe that their trauma-attraction (to the violence) theory is proved when the spouse remains with the batterer. While the culture applies Determinism to question the motives and apparent wrongful choices of batterees, batterers avoid responsibility for the criminal violence. They beat, maim and kill again because the culture didn't learn from the previous traumatic, in this example, spouse battering, experiences.
Within the ETM theoretical paradigm for addressing criminal violence, Stoicism, Behaviorism, and Determinism are rooted in trauma etiology. They are cultural survival - philosophical responses that are intended to protect the culture from the trauma. But because of these survival - protective abstractions, the trauma-affected culture is incapable of addressing either the etiology or its symptoms. The culture doesn't learn from the traumatic event. The trauma controls the culture.
To wage the battle against repeating violent crime, open cultures engage their best and strongest learning tools: interpretation of wrong-doing and debate. It would be hoped that the more vigorous a culture investigates and exposes its problems, the more successful would be the cultural elements that are trying to overcome the destruction. Discovery through truth-seeking should help the culture to learn from the horrible events. The truths and discovery should provide meaningful solutions.
But they don't. They must be applied within the culture's dislearning paradigm that precludes identification and reversal of trauma etiology. Otherwise, it might excuse the wrong-doing the investigation is intended to identify and stop.
The simultaneous cultural requirement to identify operational dysfunction, but while avoiding its relationship to trauma etiology, creates an enormous conflict between its citizens, overwhelming good intents and diverting the culture's peoples from the hoped for meaningful solutions. Within this trauma-induced operational management paradox, traumatic events that should otherwise be prevented, continue unabated. Cyclically, the more traumatic events that occur, the more the requirement to deny the etiology, blame victims, and inevitably to not learn from the events. They repeat, as if infinitely.
Here is how the perpetrator's trauma exploitation methodology works. A heinous event is created. It implants trauma etiology into the targeted individuals and system. The etiology disrupts learning and decisionmaking to the extent that elements of the affected system support the perpetrator. While the system's learning response is impaired by the etiology, the perpetrator takes or gets what he or she wants.
But reminding the reader of the literature regarding different models' applications to PTS, you may recall that that's what the references say about efforts to psychodynamically reconcile the damage to a single identity. That damage is thought to be apparently too overwhelming for clinicians (particularly behavioralists) and their clients to consider. But in contrast to this view and as ETM shows, all that is needed is a simple structure that allows both clinician and patient to identify the traumatic event's intrusions upon and contradictions to that identity. It can then be reconstituted according to the ontology of the individual.
Just as reversing trauma etiology at the individual level is made simple by application of a simple structure (ETM), so also can be the reversal of systemic etiology existing at all organizational, including cultural, levels. The structure just requires segmentation of tasks; approach trauma etiology incrementally. For example, a culture need only direct its systems to identify trauma etiology wherever it presents within the culture. Reversing that etiology quickly following new traumatic events would preempt individual and systemic post trauma symptomatologies. To successfully redirect these systems to reverse individual and systemic etiology, adopt the recommendations made in Professional/ Strategic.
Also (and as are emphasized in the above referenced Strategic ETM recommendations), strengthen the structure by reversing trauma etiologies of social managers first. When their etiologies are reversed, trauma-affected managers are facilitated to see the need for reversal of trauma etiology in those being managed, like victims within the public.
Once those etiology reversal protocols are proceduralized for addressing near-term trauma etiology, then find it in its long-term form. There's lots of unresolved long-term trauma out there in every culture, just waiting to be reversed. And where multiple etiologies present within the same individuals, use the tasks segmentation ETM approach and reverse one etiology at a time.
Although in the beginning a culture's non ETM trained managers may think that there is too much traumatic etiology to address, that thinking would only be a function of professional training - experience deficit, and specifically a function of a lack of experience with application of the structured (segmentation and incremental) approach to etiology reversal. Cultural managers who understand trauma etiology and its reversal through the referenced "simple structure," as ETM's structure is simple, would have no such negative views about the culture's capacity to find trauma etiology wherever it exist and then to reverse that etiology as it affects every individual and system within the culture.
Moreover, reversing trauma etiology will end the trauma's inhibiting influences on the ETM adapted culture's attempts to learn from traumatic events. A culture so strengthened can then apply its behavioral- and discipline-focusd methods on trauma-causing perpetrators, circumstances and sources without the distracting, divisive and enigmatic influences otherwise created by the culture's always escalating requirements to defend itself against the etiology. Without the trauma's destructive influences, the culture's learning capacities can and will accelerate progressively and rapidly. The culture's axioms of living responsibly and accountably can be applied without always being undermined by individual and collective trauma etiology.
Here is the message for this chapter. When a culture's leaders and its people overcome the mysteries of trauma etiology and its individual, systemic and cultural defenses, that culture can then remove trauma etiology's dislearning effects upon its management activities. ETM is dedicated individually, systemically and culturally to that principle; ETM provides the means for overcoming those mysteries and defenses. And where the trauma's effects on cultural learning are removed, that culture will end violent crime, preempting those processes that cause unnecessary death and destruction of innocent people.
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