Everybody is different - for some alcoholics it will be incredibly healing in going to see a therapist or psychologist who validates their experience, lets them know that their pain from, for example, a life of abuse, is completely legitimate, and that the drive to seek something that soothed the pain is also legitimate - we are hard wired to avoid discomfort. We live in a society where addiction is demonized and people are ostracized for it. This does not help people to heal. Part of this healing is letting people know they are not "bad" or "wrong" for having these urges.
This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.
In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.
While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).
Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors.
And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies.
I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many, many generations of humanity. It most likely wasn't called "trauma" (until perhaps recently).
I also believe that our current understanding of this phenomenon has reached a level of sophistication that we've never had before, and this is bolstered by various advances in culture, science, and policy. For example, the legal use of entheogens as a medically prescribed treatment for PTSD (of course, these could be used to treat PTSD hundreds of years ago, and there were and are beautiful traditions around this -- the models were just different, though).
We may have been less trauma-naive and less trauma-generating at some point in our collective history; I wonder about the level of holism of the models of trauma at that time.
This is definitely correct! Everybody is equipped differently to cope with life. The environments we grow up in make a huge difference in this. And they vary tremendously.
Death nor violence does not have to be inherently traumatic. I would be very surprised if 100% of people back then had degrees of PTSD (and that's not what my comment was meant to imply).
A working definition of trauma: "trauma can be defined as any unresolved autonomic nervous system response. It’s about the nervous system’s response to an event, not necessarily the event itself. Events can affect each of us very differently."
The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards.
Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.
Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.:
“That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.”
Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly.
When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
Thanks for this. I’m a trauma therapist, I work with many people who have PTSD. Reading this article all I could think was:
Trauma is a sophisticated concept. As a society and species, we are pretty “trauma naive” in that we have just recently come to this understanding of the very complex web of psychological, somatic, emotional, sociological, intergenerational, and cultural aspects of this experience. Because of this, we are refining the therapeutic modalities that are most efficacious for treating trauma. See all the latest literature by Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté.
So I wouldn’t really expect these societies to know what to look for - in fact, it could have been so ubiquitous that the symptoms (and/or suppression of them e.g. regular intoxication) were normalized.
Given how warlike they were as he described in the article, it could be like asking a fish to describe water.
We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize. I can’t see why humans would be any different.
Also, many different cultures have historically had taboos around the expression and natural resolution of PTSD. I don’t know about the culture of society around the age he is speaking of in this regard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a normal aspect of life back then, too.
This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.
In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.
While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).