Healing History
A number of years ago, I dated two women in succession whose fathers had been traumatised in the Vietnam War. The father of the first had served with the Australian infantry. He never spoke of his experiences, but they were terrible enough to have resulted in disabling PTSD. He was a frightening figure to his children: distant, unpredictable, prone to violent rages and incomprehensible mood swings. The atmosphere of the household was one of fear and barely suppressed chaos. It was probably to be expected, then, that his daughter grew up with her own emotional disturbances: extreme fears of abandonment, wild rages and bouts of depression that in the end destroyed our relationship, as they had done many before.
Shortly afterwards I met Helen (not her real name): a woman of Vietnamese extraction whose parents had fled the war in the seventies. Scarred from the brutal conflict, and perhaps trying to toughen their daughter to face a traumatic world, they had beaten her almost daily. She was so desensitised to physical pain she once burnt her hand badly when she left it resting against a heater, not noticing the injury. The scars of this harsh childhood left her emotionally inaccessible. Unable to tolerate real intimacy, she was a kind of refugee herself, driven from one relationship to the next, unable to find rest.
Both these relationships were painful experiences for me, and after the break-up of the second I fell into a frightening depression. It was no normal break-up reaction. The world seemed brutal and senseless, a meaningless theatre of horrors. Walking down the corridor one day the floor seemed to sway as if about to give way and pitch me into the void. I felt I could fall and fall and nothing would catch me. This too, an echo of the past: hadn’t my own mother described her descent into depression in the same terms, a sudden plunge into a black hole? My depression led me back to the memory of those very early years, and I came to understand the impact my mother’s illness had had on me. She was herself the daughter of a man damaged by war. My grandfather had been a war correspondent on the Kokoda Track. I remembered the terror in his staring eyes when I would wake him from his afternoon map, and he would jerk upright in the bed, seeing what fearful spectres I didn’t know.
It would be a mistake to try to draw this web of connections too tight. My mother’s depression was not any kind of immediate consequence of her father’s war traumas. Nor could I say with any certainty to what extent the Vietnam War had shaped the emotional makeup of those two girlfriends. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to conclude that at least some part of the blackness that swallowed me that year was a shadow of those remote conflicts, not dead and gone, but flowing onwards through time and space and the generations. Like a river that flows partly underground, trauma may burst to the surface in a new generation and a different place, its true source obscure.
The subject of inter-generational trauma is much debated in psychology. That it exists is well documented, although the mechanism and exact nature of what is transmitted is contested. As a therapist myself, what often struck me about such inherited trauma was how uncannily the symptoms of the second generation — who weren’t directly exposed to the original trauma — could mimic those of the parents. A young child, seeing her father repeatedly startle at loud noises that evoke a distant battlefield, may develop the same exaggerated startle response. Children of holocaust survivors may suffer a deep sense of guilt mirroring the survivor’s guilt of their parents. It is as if another conservation law, analogous to the conservation of energy, is at work. Perhaps trauma, like energy, cannot be destroyed, only transmitted or transformed.
The same could be said not only of trauma, but of all the collective manifestations of the psyche: “culture” in the broadest sense. We live in a society that places an unprecedented degree of importance on individual freedom of expression and glorifies novelty. But the emphasis on individualism and its corresponding blindness to history obscures the extent to which our freedom is shaped and constrained by the past. Just as the freedom of our bodies to move and act is circumscribed by the capacities bestowed on us by evolution, so our minds move along the channels carved out by history — both collective and personal. We are certainly free to forge new paths, but as anyone who has tried to create a genuinely new artistic work knows, action outside the grooves of cultural and personal habit is extremely difficult. Cubism, for example, may just be a way of applying paint to a canvas, but it was an art form impossible to imagine for the inhabitants of, say, the sixteenth century. Only the complex developments of human consciousness resulting from the scientific and industrial revolutions could prepare the conditions under which such a way of painting could be conceived. In a very real sense we are made of history as much as we are made of atoms and molecules, shaped in the image of the past and inheriting its momentums.
Seen this way, the appalling repetitions of history are all-too predictable. The genocide of the Jews in the Second World War, for example, was unprecedented only in the scale and technological efficiency with which it was carried out. The Jews had always lived lives at the margins of Christian society, and were subject to repeated massacres, pogroms and expulsions over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the lending of money at interest, yet society had a need for such a service. Therefore it fell to the Jews — who were prohibited from entering many other trades — to provide it. As historian Barbara Tuchmann has put it, if the Jews hadn’t existed, medieval Christian society would have needed to invent them. Thus, in carrying on a stigmatised trade, the Jews came to bear the “money-grubbing” stereotype and were made to wear the society’s projected shame.
During the thirteenth century Jews were required to wear round yellow badges (said to symbolise money), prefiguring the Nazi’s infamous Star of David. When the Black Death struck in the mid fourteenth century, wiping out around a third of Europe’s population, they became a convenient scapegoat for a society desperate to find a cause for the scourge. The theory circulated that they had poisoned the wells. Pope Clement VI tried to prevent the wave of anti-Semitic hysteria, issuing a bull in which he pointed out that Jews succumbed to the plague in equal proportion to the rest of the populace, but his words went unheeded. The Jewish population was virtually exterminated in some areas during the peasant uprisings that followed. Thus an association was formed in the cultural unconscious of Christian Europe between the profound trauma of the Black Death and the Jews. It is one of history’s grisly symmetries that the holocaust came so soon after the massive and senseless death of the First World War and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, echoing the pattern of the fourteenth century.
History is replete with such recurrences. The “war on terror” and the modern prevalence of radical Islamic terrorism have extraordinarily deep roots, reaching as far back as the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth century, and even the Islamic conquest of Christian Spain in the eight century. When George W. Bush invoked the word “crusade” in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he inadvertently resurrected the spectre of thousand-year-old Christian atrocities against Muslims. Few in the west remember that Iraq itself was an artificial country created by the British after the humiliating defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, with the specific aim of expropriating oil rights from the Arabs in order to secure an ongoing supply of oil to fuel the British economy and military. Such injustices are less forgotten in the Islamic world. When we are confronted by the sight of the innocent victims of nightclub slaughters or subway bombs, it is easy to focus on the barbarity of the attackers, less easy to recognize the hidden roots of such acts in the tangled web of brutality and dispossession that is the history of Christian-Islamic rivalry.
Of course this is not to say that history is destiny, or that ancient traumas and retaliations are doomed to repeat until the end of time. Healing, reconciliation and creative cultural transformation are occurring continuously. If it were otherwise the inevitable accumulation of traumatic experiences would eventually overwhelm us. The psyche has inbuilt resources of love, resilience and creativity that allow each person to transmute suffering into wisdom, hatred into understanding, trauma into meaning. The mending of the torn fabric of collective consciousness is carried out by each individual’s processing of the historical and cultural legacy they have inherited.
A perfect example of the kind of transformation I am talking about is provided in the 2016 Ted Talk, “Our story of rape and reconciliation”, by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger. In it, the two speakers recount their journey from Tom’s rape of Elva when the two were in their early twenties, through a long process of confrontation, discussion, and finally forgiveness and reconciliation. The talk has been viewed by millions and evoked considerable controversy. One strand of criticism pointed out that forgiving an abuser may simply be letting the perpetrator off the hook; repeated cycles of guilt from the abuser and forgiveness from the victim are characteristic of many violent relationships.
Indeed caution is required in this deeply complex area. However, what this line of criticism fails to recognise is that Thordis did not “forgive” Stranger in the sense of relieving him of responsibility for his actions. Rather she demanded a genuine reckoning from him, one in which he underwent a deep, soul-searching process of responsibility-taking, acknowledging the harmful effects of his actions and their roots in an attitude of masculine entitlement which, as the #MeToo movement has clearly shown, is deeply entrenched in the culture.
It is often said that “the personal is political”. It is also true that “the personal is historical” and “the personal is cultural”, which is to say that all our lives are embedded in the stream of history, and all our actions are expressions of our culture, either transmitting or transforming it. For any person who cares about the future of this world and of humankind, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problems, and disheartened about one’s ability to effect change. But this discouragement is, in a sense, its own kind of hubris, for it makes the mistake of conflating the personal and global spheres. Just as bodily healing takes place at the level of individual cells, so cultural healing takes place in the psyche of the individual person. Helping the world is not beyond us. Our responsibility lies right here, in our own wounds, prejudices, and anger, in our transformative ability to think creatively about who we are and how we act. Our most important legacy is not determined by how indelibly we impress our name upon history, but by how our actions ripple outwards and onwards, long after our individual selves are forgotten.
It was William Faulkner who famously observed, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” History lives on, an active presence beneath the surface of the now. To live consciously is to live as fully as possible in the awareness of this legacy, knowing that we are not isolated atoms in a void, disconnected from the past and irrelevant to the future. We are living strands in the thread of being that extends out of ancient time and into a future our every action helps to shape.