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1 month ago
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“To beat that madman [Hitler], it’s not enough to survive World War II, you need to survive the war and still have your sense of humor.” –Stan Kelly-Bootle, author, Liverpool resident during the war
A reader of this blog wrote eloquently to me about how we process observations. Said he:
At some point, the observations we make, even the most carefully taken, the ones we have scrubbed free of bias, fit into narratives. That’s how we think. It’s how we build memories. It’s how we experience the world.
The stories children write are just series of and thens: “This happened and then that happened and then that happened—the end.” Those stories reflect the way the world works. This happens. Then that happens. That is objective reality. It is subjectivity that transforms this into meaning. We give our lives meaning by snapping the and thens into a narrative framework.
So while we are taking pains to observe the world in an unbiased way, it might also be profitable to examine our internal narrative-building mechanisms and see the extent to which we’re placing a thumb on life’s scale. In addition to accepting new ideas in a dispassionate, more rigorously objective way, we can also revise our stories to be more balanced.
In this Substack, I’ve discussed many times the importance of not fitting our observations to our preferred narratives. Those narratives cut both ways: reinforcing things we like and rejecting those we don’t.
A different and much deeper preferred narrative arises from traumatic experiences. In their simplest form, traumatic narratives manifest as anxiety—that is, a hypersensitivity to certain input and an excessive reaction to it when it occurs.
In this specific form, the stimulus is perceived as a threat based on an unhappy experience in which some aspect of the stimulus coincides with the original experience. For example, a particular sound or the sight of a person doing a certain thing can trigger anxiety—which is lived as a fight-or-flight impetus, most often in a situation in which neither fight nor flight is a fully realistic option. Hence the anxiety.
Decatastrophizing
Dispassionate observation cannot by itself overcome anxiety in the face of a stimulus. We know from modern insights into psychology that trauma is embedded in us far too deeply for us to address its effects through rational or emotional means. (For readers with interest in this, I recommend the landmark book The Body Keeps the Score as one of the best explanations.)
However, dispassionate observation can greatly help us do what therapists trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) term “decatastrophizing.” That is, intercepting the effect of the stimulus at the moment it presents itself.
Typical anxiety springs into action when a stimulus appears and elicits response to the worst possible outcome (the catastrophizing). For example, a person who was mauled by a dog as a young child sees an unleashed dog in a park. They might fixate on the dog to the exclusion of everything else because an internal voice is warning that the dog could attack them—just as one did years ago.
Dispassionate observation can help decatastrophize by reaffirming the objective facts: “I’m just seeing a dog. Its owner is right there. There is no threat to me. I’ve seen many dogs in my life, and none has ever attacked me since that time as a child.” By this means, alert levels and adrenaline levels can be lowered.
This is precisely the use of dispassionate observation to see things as they really are (I see a dog playing in the park) as opposed to part of a preferred narrative (every dog has the potential to maul me).
Other People’s Trauma—How Surgeons Observe
These examples touch on typical single-person trauma. But sometimes trauma comes from observing traumatic things occurring to others. This too can be difficult to handle, but dispassionate observation can be even more helpful.
Before I get into this, I need to take a sidestep that will become important later.
In preparing this post, I spoke with David Soto, a Bay Area surgeon who also teaches surgery. I asked him how students new to surgery manage feelings of queasiness when cutting someone open for the first time. He said that queasiness and similar feelings of discomfort are normal. Thousands of years of evolution have taught us that if you can see inside a human body, something terribly wrong is happening and you probably need to get out of there right away.
So when a student feels queasy, Soto says, he tells them that what they’re experiencing is perfectly normal. He keeps a chair nearby for them to sit on and collect themselves, and then he points out that in this particular case they can see inside a human being because they are trying to help. Soto says this typically resolves their queasiness; that is, the self-reminder “I see this because I’m trying to help.” adjusts the perception to the reality and enables detached observation and participation.
Other People’s Trauma—Vicarious Trauma
I also spoke with Lise Dahl, associate director of research training and standards at Human Rights Watch (HRW). This organization documents human rights violations and patterns of abuse in the belief that abusers are less likely to commit crimes when they know their actions will be brought to light and documented. The group’s reports, which are grim reading indeed, are on their website: hrw.org.
HRW has about 150 researchers on the ground, with several who investigate active situations while the rest document abuses after they’ve occurred.
In documenting abuses—that is, observing after the fact—the investigators must be mindful of not only the victims’ trauma, but their own as well.
Typically, researchers’ work involves taking witness statements and collecting other evidence of abuse. In this work, the documenters take great care to avoid retraumatizing victims by asking them to detail the abuses they suffered or witnessed. They make clear that all testimony is voluntary, and they tell victims that they can stop at any time. Victims have no obligation to finish any statement, and they can recant any part of what they’ve previously said.
Statements from victims have the same kinds of limitations as all accounts of dramatic events: errors, forgotten details, exaggeration, active misrepresentation, and so on. However, HRW seeks corroborating testimony from multiple survivors and witnesses so as to draw a consolidated picture of what happened. To the extent possible, facts are verified and serve to buttress the final report. In this way, HRW believes perception is corrected by objective evidence and the collective testimony of witnesses.
In this work, a second form of trauma appears, called “vicarious trauma.” It’s what HRW researchers experience from exposure to victims’ trauma. When I asked Dahl about how this dynamic affects HRW reports, she said most of the researchers have learned self-care and resilience techniques. Still, HRW monitors teams closely for signs of vicarious trauma, which HRW’s Gabi Ivens says includes interrupted sleep or nightmares, intrusive imagery, avoiding certain projects or places, depression, anxiety, negative thoughts, irritability, restlessness, risky behaviour, and difficulty concentrating. If vicarious trauma is found, HRW will pull staff members back from field work for support and counseling.
As Dahl says, when you go into human rights work, you know that what you see and hear will be impossible to forget. “We all carry inside us harrowing moments we’ve heard or seen,” she says. “It’s just part of the job.” It’s similar to handling queasiness in learning surgery—with the notable exception that the gruesome sight is not endured for the patient’s benefit, but rather to preserve the memory of what happened and potentially prevent its recurrence.
Identification
The key element of vicarious trauma is identification with the victim’s suffering. Identification is an activity that greatly warps perception; but it is most often viewed as a virtue rather than a detriment. It will be the subject of my next post.
Surviving – And Moving On
Within the psyche, trauma works like a drainpipe of sorts inside experiences that are reminiscent of traumatic experiences. This pipe drains away joy, distorting the present reality by casting it as an echo of an earlier experience. Trauma can be a victim’s central emotional experience or it can be cordoned off within a smaller, fenced-in psychological compound, much as Stan Kelly-Bootle alludes to in the quotation at the top of this post.
Dispassionate observation enables us to decatastrophize traumatic events that trigger anxiety, thereby keeping the runaway horses of dramatic emotions safely inside the paddock. In this sense, it’s a refusal to allow the body’s preferred narrative of danger to define and distort the reality before us.
