Trauma: Get Over It

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If you're searching your hippocampus for a flashbulb memory, dig yourself out from beneath the wars and elections, the rhetoric and cant, and the ossified political posturing of the past five years, and try to pull up an image of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. If you're like most Americans, it will be surprisingly easy to return to the blistering reality of that morning.

The shock waves of the terrorist attacks rippled out from those who stood below the towers and watched them turn to dust, to people who saw desperate people jump to their deaths on live television, to the tens of millions who watched the entire episode replayed over and over during the week that followed. And to varying degrees, all three groups experienced trauma. (One research study found the same level of PTSD among those who saw the attacks firsthand and those who watched them on television.) The warnings of further violence, along with rhetoric about retribution heard in the days following the attacks, were also deeply implanted in our collective memory.

Remembering the numbness and shock of those days and weeks in late 2001, imagine how that horrifying parade of death and disfiguration known as the nightly news affects us. Smoke over Baghdad, gunfire in Darfur, anti-American protesters chanting in Pakistan, leaving us awash in fear.

'We're a frozen culture,' says author and neurologist Robert Scaer. 'The country is traumatized and dissociated.'

While Scaer was working as the medical director of rehabilitation services at Boulder (Colorado) Community Hospital, he discovered that people suffering from persistent physical diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, which are notoriously difficult to heal, respond well to treatment methods normally reserved for those who suffer from trauma. A patient who had been in a car accident and was suffering from whiplash, for instance, finally found relief after Scaer reenacted the accident. His radical conclusion, articulated in his books The Body Bears the Burden (Haworth Medical, 2001) and The Trauma Spectrum (Norton, 2005), is that all chronic ailments and most mental illness can be traced to trauma, and that virtually everyone in a modern society is traumatized.

Scaer goes on to argue that the very institutions of our culture -- schools, courts, and government, even the medical establishment -- are traumatizing. 'In the legal system, for example, if you're deposed, you come out in a shambles. You come out shaken and traumatized because it's so adversarial,' he explains. 'The physiology of that experience is identical to a car crash. Identical. It's the flight-fight-freeze response.'

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