How Individual Trauma Becomes Cultural Pathology

Social unrest and disruption are not new phenomena. Since the beginning of time, these occurrences can be traced throughout history amongst the politics of species preceding homo sapiens. Yet, even today, when culture seems to be destroying itself in either cruel or civil ways, we, as the outsider, cannot help but view certain behaviors in a polarized manner, as erratic and irrational or completely sane and unpretentious. 

Regardless of our judgments, what we witness play out in our neighborhoods or on television has underlying reasons making these seem like absurdities or sensibilities (depending on your perspective). When we see a problem in society, we seek not only to understand but to find closure by concluding whether or not we agree with something so we can move on with our life. This article examines cultural pathology and the underlying individual traumas that initiate these happenings.

It starts with a single adverse experience. Psychologically, when trauma occurs, we create a system of beliefs that reinforce the narrative of how we explain what happened to us to ourselves and others. 

This is because beliefs, in themselves, are a form of guidance for navigating the world. We cannot travel from point A to point B without believing that it is plausible in the first place. Without belief, we are stagnant and potentially regressive. Belief is the fuel that powers the machine, proverbially speaking. Within these beliefs and subsequent narratives are selective abstractions.

Aaron T. Beck, the godfather of cognitive and cognitive-behavioral therapy, developed the concept of selective abstraction to explain a form of cognitive bias in which negative experiences become a primary source of focus, ignoring many/most positive experiences in the process. An everyday example of this could look like focusing on the two different drivers who cut you off on your daily commute and forming the belief "there are a lot of bad drivers on the road today" while ignoring the fact that these two vehicles perhaps represent 1% or less of the actual amount of vehicles that you encounter on your drive, the majority of which was obeying all traffic laws.

Selective abstraction occurs because, for better or worse, we are biologically hardwired to focus on adverse events. It is focusing on negative events, as psychologically taxing as this may sound, that actually provide, to an extent, evolutionary benefit. 

To focus on some type of negative event is meant to provide a form of risk aversion for when a similar phenomenon reoccurs. When you see something in the present that reminds you of something negative that occurred in the past, your first instinct is likely that you should avoid the situation/experience entirely. It can be a saving grace as well as where things can get particularly convoluted.

Complications occur in one of two ways: you avoid experiences that could potentially be rewarding based on a negative experience in the past, or you seek out negative experiences due to chronic—when something reoccurs with frequency as well as over the extended course of time—traumatic experiences. 

In the case of avoidance, the selective abstraction prevents you from taking a risk due to the belief and narrative structure that if you take the risk, you will be hurt physically or psychologically. This trauma reaction, I would argue, occurs to just about everyone. Reframing the narrative, replacing old beliefs with more helpful beliefs, and exposure tend to be the best therapeutic modalities and techniques that can be employed to overcome this conundrum. 

In the case of chronic trauma, often what occurs is that the experiencer normalizes adverse events. Because they are subjectively conventional (objectively detrimental to an outsider) to the experiencer, they provide comfort and familiarity, despite the emotional damage that continues to occur. Chronic trauma is more challenging to treat. While the same techniques mentioned prior are still employed, it may be necessary for more conjunctive methods to be employed: medication, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), or psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Now that we understand how trauma manifests as thoughts in our minds, we need to understand how traumatized individuals form communities. You have often heard the phrase that birds of a feather flock together; well, the same principle applies here. When someone has gone through a traumatic experience or has the misfortune of chronic trauma, they communicate the beliefs and narratives associated with their experience(s) to others. 

When other people have not gone through something similar, and for this reason, may not know how to respond appropriately to hearing such a devastating tale, the experiencer does not feel validated and will continue to search for someone who will validate them. The trauma experiencer eventually finds the person who will validate them, and often is the case that the person who validates them also experienced something similar. The person they discover could be a new or established friend, belong to an internet messaging board group, a philosopher with a persuasive ideology, a politician with an inspiring vision, or an organization dedicated to a specific cause.

Any mass gathering of people dedicated to a similar ideology or cause contains the potential to be pathological, particularly when the ideology or cause inflicts its own form of trauma onto those who are outsiders. Not all groups are nefarious in this sense; many seek group healing through internal and external organizational efforts. Some groups, through their healing efforts, may push an ideology that brushes against our own, creating friction that should we be so stubborn as not to reprocess our own beliefs or should the group (or specific group members) not ease an aggressive push of their beliefs, then this can be a traumatic experience in of itself. Thus, we arrive at the reason why beliefs, narratives, and ideology are often such contentious topics when brought to the table.

Anytime a belief, narrative, or ideology is sacrificed to adopt something more enriching, fulfilling, and meaningful into our schema of what we think we know, we face the existential unknown. We cannot know with certainty what exists within the unknown. Still, the anxiety that the unknown provokes is enough to make one desperately cling to what is known (therefore familiar) but may not be conducive to one's well-being. 

When those who are traumatized are presented with new information, they often will fight to hold onto their present beliefs, as modifying them or abandoning them is perceived as a threat that could throw them into a chaotic existential abyss. An analogy to help further explain: traveling in the dark without a map. They see their beliefs as something that have transported them to where they presently are, perhaps far removed from the bad thing(s) that happened to them, and because of the security that provides may not be willing to see how refusing to modify or replace the belief, and accompanying narrative may help them even further. 

Often, if you hold onto the pain, you protect yourself from re-experiencing the same pain; however, it can create preventative pain in the way that you do not allow yourself to seek meaning, happiness, relationship(s), and desired experience.

An example of individual trauma becoming cultural pathology could be the issue of homelessness. While there are no current statistics on the matter, I suspect that one of the major contributing factors to homelessness would be a childhood adverse experience. It appears likely that physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect from one's primary caregivers is an abundantly common (though not the only) factor among this population. The experience of childhood abuse is often correlated with elevated risk for mental health disorders and substance abuse and dependence. 

Seldom does a homeless individual, albeit there are individual differences, avoid other homeless people. They have shared experiences, network and find comradery for resources and social support, and often set up their campsites near one another. Before you know it, you, as an outsider, begin to observe large encampments popping up in public-facing areas. It is easy to pass by these people and feel a sense of anger, viewing the behaviors of these specific community members as degenerative and reprehensible. (It is also easy to view them with compassion, benevolently trying to support them, yet potentially enabling them to abdicate individual responsibility.) 

At the end of the day, though, what you do not see on the surface is an inner child that suffers from an emotionally malnourished experience. Addictions expert Gabor Mate, M.D., encourages us to have a different perspective: "the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain."

Trauma behaves very much like an addiction, with relapses regressing into familiar beliefs, narratives, and ideologies. It is repetition and ritual with a proclivity toward what comforts us. In many ways, we are all addicts as we all seek to soothe painful experiences, otherwise known as trauma. 

It is impossible to make one's way through the world completely unscathed. We all skin our knees or bump elbows at some point; some experience far worse. Moreover, when these types of difficulties occur, we must process and reprocess our experiences as we risk inhibiting our potential as well as becoming burdensome to those around us.

Prepping to heal is no easy task, which is primarily the reason why therapists are often employed. You can do some things on your own that are conducive to the healing process. 

One of the easiest things you can do is consume works of art—movies, paintings, photographs, music. Art contains narratives that are windows into the broader landscape of human experience. Art can evoke emotion(s) that seem outside of ourselves. Art can momentarily allow for a positive dissociative experience from our lives, only to return to ourselves transformed.

Another healing tactic is to write down an unhelpful belief and then proceed to write, directly below, a more helpful one instead. Doing so puts you in a position of healthy skepticism, readily acknowledging that you cannot state with absolute conviction that the story you tell yourself is one hundred percent infallible. If you choose not to change your beliefs over time, you become stagnant and more willing to take a reductionistic perspective of others and the world. By challenging beliefs, you can challenge ideologies you may have wholeheartedly subscribed to. No ideology is perfect and absolute certainty toward following a doctrine is to deny valuable experience and fool oneself into dogmatic thinking.

Lastly, it is important to have gratitude for your experience, even those that have caused immense suffering. Even though people or the world have betrayed and harmed you, you could not be where you are now without having gone through such agony. The more you are grateful for your suffering, the more accepting you are of what occurred. The more accepting you are of what occurred, the more you have the capability to do something about it.

 Nobody has ever changed in a positive way from believing that something should have never happened; this is the denial of experience. If you deny experience, you deny having any control over how you perceive such difficulties. No, we cannot change the past; we can only change how we view such bygone memories, which, as it turns out, can alter our attitude in the present and the future.

Citations

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mate, G. (2008). In the realm of hungry ghosts. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Peterson, J. B. (2021). Beyond order: 12 more rules for life. New York, NY: Penguin; Portfolio.