Doesn't that describe almost all books on psychology?
Psychology studies tend to be so hilariously unscientific that I'd rather get the coherent opinions and gut feelings of an experienced practicing expert, rather than half-arsed studies.
Thanks for the list nonetheless.
Attachment is a weird thing, because it usually happens so early in life where there are no memories yet.
However, infants still internalize everything, they can feel, react to the environment and understand consequences of what their feelings tell them. "If I'm scared, then there's a high probability of something bad to be happen to me".
So, there are may not be rational memories to be linked to the problem 20-30 years later in life.
P.S.
Speaking from the personal experience - during the focusing practice I was able to verbally conceptualize these old feelings which became a part of my identity.
In the end, the crux was being an infant, a sensation of being blind, overfocused on touch and sounds, high sensation of exposedness and nakedness, sensation of mother's touch and realisation that she's unable to attune to me emotionally, like it's still a human touch, but similar to touching a stone.
Hence, the futile cry and scream to draw her attention out of fear to be protected.
To paraphraze, it felt like if now, I'd get tied (immobilized), blindfolded and left naked in the night Luisiana swamps.
It's weird, but I think, I actually understood why infants may cry and have a need to be seen and connected to. It seems to be so logical for me nowadays - they are humans too, after all.
Yeah that was the hidden question I had, your neurology can stack up years of life until you end up in a dead end and everything breaks.
Surely there is another recommendation/simplification?
A very approachable work on the subject, exploring the four attachment types (but recognising that they are on a multi-dimensional spectrum), with real-world examples and practical strategies for coping.
Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff. I can honestly say the people I know who are more knowledgeable in all this psychology-trauma material seem to be the least well adjusted. Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically. Maybe it's just correlation. Maybe if we didn't have all this academic literature on trauma becoming mainstream people would be doing even worse. But it also seems possible that over-analyzing and over-pathologizing 'trauma' can have exactly the opposite effect we hope it to have.
Get good at communicating and being vulnerable. I know online spaces will tell you this is dangerous, and that your partner might leave you. Someone with this sort of background needs to be 'seen', and loved for who they are, and the only way that happens is if they truly know you. Second, realize that your partner is not the sole source of all your feelings about them. You're seeing the world through trauma colored glasses, and it often helps to take a step back, take a breath and ask yourself why you're feeling what your feeling rather than acting on it immediately.
Very good advice! (And the rest of your comment too)
The possibility of being rejected by being vulnerable is definitional... It's not being vulnerable if there isn't the possibility of rejection, it's just being transparent. So yeah, being vulnerable is dangerous. You might get rejected. But then again, you might get accepted, too.
(This isn't a critique of the parent, it's more of a critique of what the "online spaces" allegedly say.)
In very different societies. Our societies have gradually become less and less like what we evolved to fit into: small groups, time out doors, lots of face to face contact with people you are close to etc.
Some past societies were pretty miserable for many people. I am pretty sure slaves had lots of trauma and other psychological problems, but not one cared. Even where people were cared about there were no consistent records kept so maybe we do not know.
> Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically.
I think religious faith and practices probably do help. However, that is not a practical solution because it is not something you can fake. You cannot just decide to believe something, and you may need faith rather than just belief to get the benefits. The benefits are a side effect of the aims of the religion (developing a relationship with God, achieving nirvana, etc.) and will not happen unless you are sincerely following the aim.
Religions have practices and ideas that help resilience, and sometimes those parallel ideas in psychology and therapy - but for the reasons above will not work out of context.
That is even without taking into account the possibility that (some) religious beliefs are true and, for example, God will (at least sometimes) answer a sincere prayer for the strength to cope with your problems. Maybe your Catholic and Muslim friends are receiving divine support - or just believing in a constant loving and perfect parental figure is a source of comfort that promotes resilience.
What I have found helpful, when I went through something like this, is to distinguish between the "feeling" of certainty and the "choice" to put my faith in something. A lot of the time, we talk about "faith" and we conflate those two. I can choose to trust something and not feel confidence in it until after the fact. How much confidence I feel in a choice varies for a lot of reasons, but I may still choose to accept the risk and act on the little information I do have because I don't have better alternatives.
In that sense, you can choose what you believe. Or at least, you can choose what you put your faith in.
Those religions mandate women to submit to the male or they are kicked out of the group. Of course things are more orderly when there is a chain of command and severe consequences (like losing your whole family) for demanding equality, asking questions, or questioning authority. Don't confuse the order for happiness. Ask a Muslim or Catholic what happens when you're gay, for example. Or review what the Churchs response was to child sexual abuse. In that case the social order actively contributed to more trauma!
I will say, that while I've read a lot of these sorts of books, they've mainly helped me identify my predispositions in temperament, my blind spots, etc. If you really press a therapist on the question, they will tell you that the only real way to 'treat' this is having loving and stable friends and romantic partners. I imagine being religious can help as it grants you easy access to a welcoming community, and frankly 'god' is the ultimate parental figure for those that believe.
Possibly off-topic rant: If the reason is "it was God's will, because God is sovereign and therefore everything is his will", I think that is bordering on function heresy. Christianity (and life) has all these tensions: God is one, but God is three; Jesus is a man, but Jesus is God; God is sovereign, but he gave us free will. The temptation is to resolve the tension by cutting off one of the ends of the tension. The original heretics chopped off one of the ends of the tension about Jesus: Jesus was only man and not God (for example, Adoptionism, Arianism) and Jesus was only divine and not man (for example, Docetism, Apollinarianism). The view that evil is God's will is similarly chopping off our responsibility, so it is doing the same thing that the original heretics did. In my view, the biblical view is that people doing evil is NOT God's will, but what he wants to achieve requires that he give us free will (and his plan of resolving our choice to do evil is to put his spirit in our hearts).
Someone leaning on the “everything happens for a reason” in a counseling context is gross - I almost took a swing at someone bleating that when my wife died.
It gives lots of evidences on what you've just said.
Just simply living a life, focusing on goals and targets, making mistakes and learning from them - this works too. In my case, personally, I just couldn't ignore the problems anymore. I've also made this mistake of dwelling into wounds burning out people around me and being unavailable for them instead of trying to focus more on something good.
I think, we barely scratched the complexity of human psyche, and there lot's of moving parts in person's development. There might be a bit of dehumanization and modern over-materialistic somewhat arrogance perspective - how can I stop feeling what I feel, so I could continue my business as usual?
A few things why religion helps, out of the head:
- it's an empirical study of human psyche over thousands of years
- highlights importance of intentions behind actions
- emphasizes on connection with the world
Sounds totally reasonable?
The universal practical tip would be "just live your life, pay attention and genuinely try to make good out of it", but if being specific and speaking from personal experience and a keeping it small:
- studying violence (the last book in the list) significantly reduced anxiety, risk seeking behavior and moral rigidness (e.g. what is it: "social anxiety" or "embodied situational awareness"?)
- "woundology" and focus on trauma/pain without keeping healing as a target in mind, will, most probably, just make it worse; but studying the topic still has advantages
- try to pay attention to intuition, it seems like psyche tries to heal itself naturally or at least to draw an attention to yet not understood problem/information gifted to a person about the world/life; try to find out what is the center of what draws you onto it (or maybe scorns you off way more than you yourself would expect normally): Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is a quite good tool for that
- combine both inner and external healing - with a grain of salt, as some people I've met have better outcomes with focusing on actions/thoughts (CBT), while for me a deeper body/intuition oriented inner work seems to suit better; but it's good to try and keep both in mind
- it's ok to reach for medication when it's really bad as a temporal support on the path; don't replace everything with meds, but don't reject them completely either - it's always possible to get back on track later
- things seem to get better over time, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment: new realizations, some knots are untying, sometimes something changes radically and sometimes for the good, and it's difficult to predict that; it's obvious since it's like a personalized empirical search - it needs practice and time, although a possibility of a downward spiral is here as well
- relationships have a degree of power to both devastate and heal
I had this book in my read queue, until I saw a podcast where she basically outted herself as an anti-vax covid denier. She may well have a point but after that I could only see her as an unhinged contrarian.
It seems there are very, very few people in the history of the world whose work would survive. Perhaps none.
Yes. I judge people on that. We all have the freedom of speech. We do not have freedom from the judgement of others.
Are you prepared to extend this practice universally? Are you aware that practically nobody can survive this sort of puritanical Maoist cancel culture? Look at what happened in China or Cambodia for recent examples of how that goes.
If that's 'puritanical Maoist cancel culture' so be it. You told on yourself with that phrase. This isn't a good faith discussion, and I'm out.
She may well have a point but after that I could only see her as an unhinged contrarian.
You're the one talking about cancelling, not him. We all have the freedom to listen to who we want.
I am a bit of a contrarian about lots of things. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known were major contrarians.
Are Linus Torvalds or RMS contrarians? What about Richard Feynman or Tesla?
I don’t really know if any of those examples would be widely considered contrarians, but my point is that people are multi faceted. Dismissing a person in a broad manner for unpopular opinions in one arena, strikes me as a religious mindset.
Does everyone have to pass a purity test before their opinions are able to be considered? Is that healthy?
Thank you for any consideration you can give this. I truly do not mean to start a flame war. One more thought experiment: is it ok to learn woodworking from an Amish person who likely would have wildly diverging views from most people?
When you're outspoken about an objective fact that has been proven out by a mountain of evidence like vaccines being safe, or the earth being round, that's when I become very skeptical of any of your other opinions.
The amish woodworker is an interesting question. I wouldn't judge him for being wrong about things outside of his domain as I'd assume ignorance instead of malice, but if he started popping off very wrong theories on the nature of oak vs pine I'd probably be leery.
We get it wrong a lot. It will be interesting to see how the vax debate and perception plays out over the next few years.
But that's why any therapist worth their salt will focus on engaging and healing those issues. Yes we engage with the trauma response, but in a safe space so that you can walk out of being trapped in it.
I also believe that one can go without facing deeply traumatic events for an entire life and seem to many on the outside to be doing much better than one who goes the difficult path of deconstructing oneself and their family history.
And I think our unhappiness and that of our children is well explained by our late-stage-capitalist, individualistic cultures and the rise of technology that profits from (ill-)serving our social needs.
'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Jiddu Krishnamurti
I get it, some lessons are hard to teach and it’s easier to present the framework of the lesson in a story, then people make connections as they grow.
But you also have to consider all of the harmful misinterpretations that come with it.
If most people come away from religion less ethical than nonreligious people, let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.
E.g. learning about mystical buddhism versus just going to therapy and breathing for a while.
How do you test that? You cannot do a double blind test because you cannot induce religion in people to order.
> let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.
I do not think you can do that. Each religion is largely shaped by a few key ideas. Remove one of those and you change it radically (losing the good) remove anything else and you will not change anything significant.
You can reform and improve religions, but I think history shows that is not easy nor are the results predictable.
I think you over-emphasise the importance of texts to religions in general. Texts are the foundation of American evangelical Christianity and (to an extent I am worse equipped to judge) Islam, but much of Christianity and at least some schools of Buddhism are really based in a very small core of ideas.
I’ve been around a lot of very Catholic people. I’d say half are well intentioned, whereas half are belligerent antivax etc.
The ones with good intentions prop up and obey the bad actors.
The ones with good intentions end up feeling trapped by the community and the religious trauma. Sometimes the good ones end up taking it out on their spouses/kids, perceived as units of the oppressive structure (though they are victims alike).
The difficulty of reform is all the more reason I’m happy for the slow decline in religiosity.
I think another big value of religion is the community that comes with it. Its really easy to get along with people who tell the same stories.
And maybe there's something else I'm less aware of, idk. My point is there seems to be something we've not figured out well enough to apply it.
I've seen this firsthand in my own family, a family beset with undiagnosed ADHD and trauma from a violent patriarch, who was no doubt subject to the same abuse, lying about his age to join armies on BOTH sides of the conflict in WW2 to escape and eventually emigrate.
As for the difference in psychological resilience: it's more much more likely those who have been traumatised are seeking understanding, rather than healthy then traumatised by their curiosity. Conversely, it's been shown religious people are, as a whole, more psychologically resilient, largely due to community and the accompanying support system it provides. However, there is also a strong element of suppression within those communities, which directly contributes to the very trauma of which I speak.
If there is no communication, the abused, very often, become the abusers. And so the wheel turns.
The fact that trauma is now everywhere sort of de-legitimizes it to the point where there's no way of knowing in the average case. Also the fact that it's essentially a business at this point
> but you've got no idea of how much damage this attitude unwittingly propagates the trauma on succeeding generations
Sounds like you're saying: become emotionally pure or else. Personally I'd rather have "trauma" than play this little head game. And imo the younger generations will be better off, on average, not playing it either
If anything, we're doing significantly more damage by teaching upcoming generations to trust the pharmaceutical industry
I can tell you that trauma is very real for the person experiencing it, and it's this kind of flippant dismissal that stops people from seeking help.
Trauma everywhere, in what fashion? Perhaps because more people are talking about it, more people are getting the courage to talk about it.
> Sounds like you're saying: become emotionally pure or else.
Emotionally pure? What does that even mean? It was phrased as a warning, because I've experienced this attitude within my family, and seen the damage it's caused, and continues to cause. Eventually, the damaged start damaging others, people put their hands over the ears pretending nothing's happening, and the cycle continues.
> Personally I'd rather have "trauma" than play this little head game.
What head game is being played?
> If anything, we're doing significantly more damage by teaching upcoming generations to trust the pharmaceutical industry.
The argument I was making had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry. It was about how trauma gets suppressed, and how that can institute a cycle of trauma, so be wary of how you approach it. It's all about taking care of people.
Social contagion is a thing. Just because more people are taking about something doesn't mean it's true
> Eventually, the damaged start damaging others, people put their hands over the ears pretending nothing's happening, and the cycle continues.
It doesn't take therapy or a bunch of trauma ideology to know that hurting people is wrong. Someone could have a perfect upbringing and still be a piece of shit. Alternatively someone could have a shitty upbringing and be a good person. The latter case doesn't require the person to "come to terms with their trauma" in the methodology that gets dictated to them by this decade's version of psychology
> The argument I was making had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry.
Maybe not directly, I was suggesting a more productive alternative than the one in the comment I was responding to
> It doesn't take therapy or a bunch of trauma ideology to know that hurting people is wrong.
How is this related?
> And why do they struggle to stop before therapy?
Sounds like you're implying that they stop after therapy also
Do they, long term? Is it because of therapy or because courts/law enforcement are involved?
> why do the abused so frequently become the abusers?
I'm not saying that abuse does not make people more likely to abuse, I'm saying that therapy alone does not reliably make them better people
> Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.
In fact, and this is especially true for men, the correct response to this line of reasoning is basically "well, actually, no they didn't." The genetic lineages of most men over the entirety of human history, are extinct - we are descended from the comparative few who aren't. For example Ötzi the iceman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) has no living descendants. He is typical.
Not only that, but there is no reason to think that the surviving genetic lineages are remotely optimized for individual happiness, or for that matter individual industriousness or productivity (esp in the context of modern productive relations) or whatever other metric you want to measure people by.
All of which is to say, that even accounting for the fact that basically most people who ever lived have no living descendants, we just don't value, individually or collectively, even the attributes that would have been selected for among human populations in the bronze age, neolithic, whatever. So if we want to make those things happen (i.e. if we want people to be happy and productive) we need to create the conditions for it and we need to give them significant help in doing so, as well. That "significant help" is probably going to be something like what we call "therapy" today - though, as I mentioned above, I think contemporary therapeutic practices are doing a horrible job at it. But, there is a job to do there, IMO.
By “humans” do you mean 50%, 75%, 90%, 99%, or 99.99% of the population?
By “got by” do you mean “lived mentally strong and resilient and healthy lives” or “just managed to do enough labor to not be ostracized and cut off from resources” or “maybe they couldn’t, but nobody wrote about or wanted to remember those people anyway” or “nobody had the vocabulary to describe their state or behavior as anything more than ‘unpleasant/unbecoming’”?
The veteran suicide rate is an evergreen cause of concern, but one of the major stories amongst veterans is that they leave this community where they had a very clearly defined role, with very clearly defined acceptable modes of behavior, and when you leave, all of that is stripped away. The sudden absence of community and sense of purpose is, for many veterans, an unbridgeable gap.
There absolutely are insidious downsides to such tight-knit communities (especially in response to threats to the community - vis how often the victim of clerical sexual abuse encounters further attacks from members of the church). But e.g. religious organizations have persisted for so long because there's a sort of cost-benefit analysis occurring, where the community decides that so long as the community continues to function, its OK that a few members of the community are sacrificed to protect it.
To be clear, its not like PTSD is a new thing. Catatonia, combat fatigue, etc, are stress responses that have been recognized for centuries. Its just that only fairly recently we've concluded that hey, maybe writing people off when they hit that point is a bad thing, and maybe we should invest some time in helping people before they reach that state.
People who learn not to trust as children retain that into adulthood. Thats the core issue with many problems. It’s even a driver for PTSD - not everyone goes to war or experiences something terrible and leaves with a disorder.
Consider 100 years ago it was acceptable to beat your wife. It was not considered socially unusual for a working class man to have his children underfed after drinking his salary away. Thats an example of how humans poorly cope with the inhumane conditions of industrial society.
Trauma is in the eyes of the beholder.
I’m part of a catholic community that is a loving and supportive place. I’m not a dogmatic or “good catholic” by any means, but I find inspiration and meditative comfort in prayer. And having gone through some horrific challenges in my life, my friends and family there have helped me get through. There’s no magic imo, your “tribe” will help you get through things.
Being versed in the terminology of a subject is not the same as being an adept practitioner.
The next few generations will become better practitioners while us graybeards (encompassing down to those in high school now) will suffer from the consequences of not receiving a better education in mental wellness and lacking the structural supports necessary for that.
There are still a lot of barriers to widespread mental wellness from taking root in American culture: homelessness, poverty, class, conservatism, regressive religions, et cetera.
Funnily enough, I picked up up thinking this stuff was nonsense. Then it hit me like a bag of bricks. It was very humbling.
Since then I’ve also found writing by James Hollis very useful. One which stood out for me was “Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men”. It’s quite insightful about how modern life can afflict men, and how men can learn, adapt, and overcome these challenges. It’s refreshingly well-rounded and takes seriously the idea that men can suffer just as women do, patriarchy or not (and even because of it), and offers tools to work towards making things right.
In general his work is a great stepping stone from understanding CPTSD to then finding more nuanced models of the internal mechanisms, how to understand and articulate them, then ultimately grow beyond them. Some may find the Jungian psychology overwhelming or off-putting (I did initially), but there is real substance there.
A few useful books which helped me with both understanding and healing (there're still problems, but it gets better):
1. Love Sense, Sue Johnson.
2. The Power of Attachment, Diane Pooler Heller.
3. Understanding Disorganized Attachment: Theory and Practice for Working with Children and Adults, David, Shemmings and Yvonne Shemmings.
4. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk.
5. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, Sue Johnson.
6. "Focusing" practice, Eugene Gendlin.
7. How to survive the most critical 5 seconds of your life, Tim Larkin.
The first four lay down foundations, explaining the mechanics, possible solutions, will help in navigating, filtering and planning the healing.
The 5th and 6th are actual healing, former for couples, the latter mostly for individuals.
The last one is about a wisdom of violence embedded into the body of affected individuals which is likely suppressed by the rational part of the mind.