"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a true mental illness. It’s not a debatable condition, something made up by soldiers for compensation or sympathy. Human Beings placed in situations that grossly overwhelm the mind are left with a permanent set of often disabling symptoms. One of those symptoms is being obsessed with preventing the past. The afflicted person carries the knowledge that one can "lose one’s mind," that one’s ongoing sense of being can be so interrupted as to be experienced as a "psychological death" – something the rest of us don’t really know. They’ve been in a dire situation where there was nothing they could do to get things under anything like control, leaving them with the anticipatory terror that such a thing could happen again. So the only solution is prevention – preventing ever being in such a vulnerable spot again.
Those of us who have spent a lot of time working with such people come slowly to know that these are not things that "go away," that one "gets over." The help comes in deeply understanding what happened, how it affected you, how it continues to affect you on a daily basis. Patient’s have to learn to carry one’s previous psychological death as a conscious mental content, never letting it lurk in the shadows where it generalizes to all of life. If there’s a political analogy, it’s containment rather than conquest. Attempts to "put it behind you" paradoxically result in the opposite – being "followed" for all time. How can one live as if the worst thing that can happen to a person, losing the use of the mind, didn’t happen?
We have it as a nation. The 911 attack that brought down the Twin Towers in New York shattered our national psyche, and now we are different. We are obsessed with preventing the past. In the airport, we line up for the T.S.A. checks like sheep. I, for one, look at the people in line, in the waiting area at the gate, scanning for Terrorists. I can’t help it. President Bush and Mr. Cheney insist that we listen to communication traffic at a level that recalls the worst of the U.S.S.R. We are engaged in an absolutely absurd war with a country that we never needed to fight only because they might possibly have been a threat [and we needed to do something]. There has never been such a level of Xenophobia in this country, a country populated almost totally by immigration. We lived for decades in a world where the Communist Bloc had enough atomic bombs to vaporize the planet trained on our shores every day, but now we go insane if anyone else even wants to make one, or goes looking for Uranium. We’re terrified.
How do we heal the national psyche? If we take a lesson from the treatment of the patients with P.T.S.D., we forget the metaphor of healing. P.T.S.D. is a chronic condition that doesn’t "go away." Instead, we acknowledge how much that day affected our everyday lives, and we become obsessed with knowing how that moment colors every decision we make. President Bush and his cronies are terrible offenders, preaching fear in every sermon speech. They link everything to 911 – Terrorism, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Liberals, the list is endless. They are currently talking to us like we don’t understand the dangers, like we didn’t watch the same T.V. coverage they watched. We need to contain 911 to what it was – the attempt by a group of religious fanatics to drive us crazy – a successful attempt by a group of religious fanatics to drive us crazy. We’ve allowed a moment in time that’s very specific to change us in a generalized way, make us into a globally paranoid country. We need leaders who understand what has happened, and help us live with it, contain it, in a balanced perspective – leaders who take threats to our safety very seriously, but don’t destroy our 200 years of democracy and freedom in the process.
We can never prevent the past. It already happened.
[…] I said below that I think we have post traumatic stress disorder as a nation, particularly our leaders. I actually believe that this thought of mine is correct. Post traumatic stress disorder destroys the statistical nature of the universe. The non-traumatized can usually judge the likelihood of possible events. Some are either too naive, or too able to use denial, to do that, but most of us have that ability. We know intuitively which alley not to walk down. For traumatized people, a remote possibility is a certainty – there is neither absolute nor relative safety. It’s all alleys. […]