I watched a movie1 where two young brothers witness a traumatic event (a murder). One of them is scarred for life, the other, slightly older boy, emerges completely unscathed. What’s the difference?
The reason the same event traumatizes one but not the other is because one boy “solved” the problem in the moment, with his conscious mind, and the other failed to do so. The problem was thus recorded in long term storage (his body) for safekeeping.
I consider something “unnecessary trauma” if there exists a way to solve the problem without resorting to the “long term body storage fail-safe”.
In the case of the movie: the young boy saw the murder, froze with fear, and relied on his brother to figure out what to do. The older boy decided first to hide, then to investigate, grab a gun, and then shoot in self defense the attacker who committed the crime & who had by now spotted them. He then took his younger brother & himself back home to safety.
The trauma is necessary for the younger boy, because he must make a decision:
Live the rest of his life knowing that, if he’s ever in the same situation, he will NOT survive
Figure out what he could have done in order to survive, and learn to do those things
(1) is not really a solution, because he doesn’t know what “the same situation” means. Will he be in danger if he witnesses another murder? What about just a regular old mugging? What about something even less dangerous than that? How much danger is he in on a day to day basis??
These questions are necessary to answer for his survival. The answers may be worse than what he wants2 (he may, in fact, be in danger all the time). His mind’s inability to choose means his body will choose for him. Awareness of the truth (how much danger he is in daily) might be WORSE for his survival.
(2) is the process of healing the trauma. You can’t lie to your body. It will only release it from long term storage when you prove that you can survive a dangerous situation. This requires you to actually be in real danger, and to watch yourself do what needs to be done.
The reason I wrote this essay today is because I think these dynamics (how trauma forms, what function it serves, and how it can be released) applies to cultures & ideologies.
A human body stores an important lesson as trauma, until it is no longer necessary. An ideology stores important lessons as cultural trauma, until it is no longer necessary.
Adopting a “pro-regulation” stance is an example of cultural trauma3. If you witness bad things happening in an open market, you reach for regulation to stop it. But if you don’t know WHEN to apply it, you will be stuck either (1) putting it on everything (2) not putting it on everything, but constantly feeling in danger.
One of the goals of the Human Memome Project is to identify cultural trauma and heal it. A lot of people who are fighting for things that are good & true unwittingly keep pushing others deeper into trauma. If someone sees regulation as their safety blanket, and you go and tell them, we need less of it, then it SEEMS like you’re arguing FOR danger.
They can’t tell when the safety blanket is necessary, and when it is not
Which means they also can’t tell if YOU can tell. They can’t tell if you’re incompetent, and will put us all in danger, or if you are evil, and are intentionally putting them in danger
When you argue for something that is safe, good, true, and you get resistance, we can identify if the source of that resistance is trauma. If it is, we can “operate” on it. We can heal it by helping people increase their discernment.
Now that we understand this concept, we can search for “unnecessary trauma”, what needs to be understood to resolve it, and once we find that answer, propagate it.
Sorry I can’t remember the name of the movie - I watched it on a plane, and I never finished it, but I think a lot about that opening scene.
The idea of “not wanting to know ugly truth” deserves its own essay, but I don’t have it fully articulated yet. I think of this as a kind of “valley of growth” or “valley of awareness”. It explains why choosing greater awareness is difficult. It will eternally be difficult. There is no way to “solve” this problem permanently.
Let’s say you look down on people who choose to avoid truth (greater awareness). If there is a chance that things are really bad, you’d rather know. You will always open the box no matter how ugly the truth inside of it may be.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you are necessarily more likely to survive. The truth may help you survive, IF you know what to do about the ugly truth. If the ugly truth leads to you giving up, or making the wrong decisions, then you’ve just doomed yourself. You were better off NOT looking, and continuing to survive, until you were ready. You were better off ceding control to your body/intuition/others than steering the ship with your conscious mind & crashing it. If you aren’t sure you can drive, you’re better off letting someone else take the wheel.
I think the problem is “eternal” because it always requires a risk - you don’t know what’s outside your awareness until it is, and then it’s kind of permanently there.
I wrote about a kind of inflection point of this trauma healing in Nov 2024 in “Blue tribe is starting to win by adopting the best of conservative values”
A lot of psychology research is bullshit but the good news is you can run your own experiments and find out - same way you can run the code yourself, we don't have to trust any claims blindly
I do like these thoughts, but there are some significant problems. First, you are talking about a movie. Characters in movies are under no obligation to being depicted as experiencing realistic emotional or cognitive dynamics. This is extremely common in any film which depicts violence, doubly so for those which depict 'justified' violence. In reality, even the most righteous soldier or home protector is very commonly inflicted with deep trauma when they overcome their brains own desire to not enact great bodily harm on another human, but that doesn't make for cinematic violence which is what audiences want to see. They don't want to see how the hero is unmade by being the savior.
Rational understanding occurs in the linguistic and higher-order parts of the brain. Emotions are much lower-level and far more closely tied to the body and visceral experience. Specifically, emotions are conditioned responses which equate to predictions (not conscious predictions, but at the level of neuron activation thresholds being lowered in the associated nerves in response to a stimulus) in the brain of imminent bodily changes. In case studies of people who have experienced total facial paralysis, for example, it can be seen that shortly afterward they no longer find themselves getting angry (anger expression is primarily facial). Awhile after that, they find they can't subjectively recall what it felt like to get angry. Even later still, they lose the ability to recognize anger being expressed in the faces of others. Their condition essentially forced upon them an un-conditioning of the anger response. If the response is not reinforced by expression, or expression is consciously forced to be something different, the conditioning can be changed (although this can be difficult and take a great deal of time depending on many factors).
You can (most likely) experiment with this yourself without much difficulty. Rationally speaking it should be quite easy for you to conclude that there is no objective, reasonable justification for feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of being nude or being seen nude by people you know and trust. So, have a discussion with someone else who might be like-minded and curious enough to experiment with this who you've never been nude with before. Sit down, fully clothed, and discuss whether you think it makes any sense for there to be any discomfort, disgrace, whatever. If you can come to a conscious, comfortable agreement with utter certainty that holding a conversation clothed and nude should feel precisely the same, disrobe and continue your conversation, paying attention to what emotions flow regardless of what decisions you made beforehand. They pass fleetingly enough, don't worry, after a couple minutes you'll wonder where that adrenaline dump and cortisol spike upon disrobing came from. After all, you figured it out and 'solved it' beforehand, right?
That verbal rational part of the brain and the emotional part generally do not talk. The emotional part is all based on associations, conditioning, and visceral experience. If you take two people, one raised in a family of naturists who attended naturist camps and beaches regularly growing up, and another who was shouted at and reprimanded from the time of being a toddler any time they were unclothed in the presence of others, who spent their life taking care to not being caught 'indecent' even around their family, and place them on a stage and 'pants' them (do not do this, it would be tremendously unethical) - one would be mildly miffed at most, while the other would experience an instantaneous and possibly life-long deep traumatic wound that would very likely cause intense life-altering PTSD.