Trauma As Exile: Terror, Shame and the Destruction of Certainty

Brothers, D. (2008). Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis. New-York: The Analytic Press.

Chapter Three

Trauma as Exile: Terror, Shame and the Destruction of Certainty

A. A violent order is disorder; and

B. A great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Wallace Stevens (1942) Connoisseur of Chaos

Nancy, whose “star-is-born” fantasy we examined in the last chapter, claimed that “from time immemorial,” she knew exactly what would happen on Saturday afternoons. Her father, she explained, would arrive home from work with a package under his arm. “For me, Daddy?” she would ask. “For you, darling,” he would answer. When Nancy was little, the package usually contained a toy or a coloring book. After tearing off the wrappings, she would leap into his arms and cover his cheeks with grateful kisses. Unable to count on her mother’s emotional availability, or even her physical presence since she often secluded herself during frequent bouts of depression, Nancy had drawn close to her father. She’d had no reason to doubt that “he adored me just for being myself.”

When Nancy reached puberty, the packages, which continued to appear under her father’s arm on Saturday afternoons, became objects of dread. Her fingers would tremble as she unwrapped items of clothing intended to make her look “cute and sexy.” Although the incestuous implications of the gifts alarmed her, far more distressing was her awareness that, in the seductive garments she wore at her father insistence, she became a rival in her mother’s eyes. By the time Nancy turned 15 she had lost all hope that their tattered bond might be restored. Even on the rare days when her mother ventured out of her locked room, Nancy felt “locked out of her heart.”

Saturdays now became the time when she would have “dates” with her father that usually ended in necking and petting sessions in his car. It was then that the familiar homeland of childhood vanished and she found herself, much like Alice, in a strange, surreal and dangerous world.

Our craving for contingent interaction is born with us, or so my reading of early infancy studies seems to indicate (see Chapter Two). But as Nancy learned all too well, orderliness and predictability in human relations alone do not guarantee psychological well-being. What must be consistently available are the self-sustaining relational interactions that self psychologists refer to as selfobject experiences. Child-rearing practices that exact unquestioning obedience, governmental policies that crush dissent, and group tactics that enforce conformity are just a few examples of pernicious relational patterns that tend to be imposed with inexorable regularity. Even when not inflicted by means of force or coercion, undue regimentation seem contrary to the tumultuous complexity that many of us relish in being alive.

Painful experiences of existential uncertainty, then, are just as likely arise in contexts of too much order and predictability as in contexts of too little. I have treated patients who, on perceiving me as having strayed too far from some analytic convention, have lost confidence in the self-sustaining capacity of our engagement. But I have treated just as many whose confidence was shaken when they felt I had rigidly insisted on such conventions. Concerned that my actions in both situations had diminished the trustworthiness of my analytic relationships, my confidence wobbled as well. Yet, disturbances of this sort are not necessarily detrimental to my psychological soundness or that of my patients. A great deal turns on what happens between between us as we address these glitches in our relating, which, it should be noted, are often the source of what self psychologists refer to as "failures in empathy," or "selfobject failures." In fact, many clinical studies by self-psychologically informed analysts seem to indicate that healing is most likely to occur in the context of efforts to understand and repair such disruptions within a therapeutic relationship.

According to dynamic systems theory, where order is unperturbed, change is impossible. It seems, therefore, that our development as individuals depends on some degree of disorder and disorganization. Mahoney and Moes (1997: 187) go so far as to conceptualize development in terms of "cascades of disorganization." Curiously, disorder is not always clearly separable from order. Under the far-from-equilibrium conditions that characterize relational systems, the spontaneous crystallization of a high degree of order ("antichaos") is frequently observed (Kauffman 1991). It would seem, then, that episodes of disorder and disorganization are not only inevitable but necessary for psychological existence. Trauma, on the other hand, is a starkly different experience. In contrast to the disorganization that results when our experiences of existential certainty are temporarily disrupted, the profound disorder--chaos--that characterizes trauma threatens us with annihilation. While we may readily acknowledge that we inhabit a world in which nothing is certain, not even our psychological survival, trauma appears to expose us to this truth in a way that we experience as unbearable. Consider these words by Karen Armstrong:

A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized.(Armstrong 2000: 8)

Although Armstrong intended this powerful sentence to describe exile, particularly as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from Spain, I believe it poignantly captures the experience of many people who are traumatized. My own traumas, and many of those described to me by my patients, seem also to involve a violent uprooting from a familiar “before” and a free-fall into an utterly unfamiliar “after.” Robert Stolorow’s (1999) description of his of sense of isolation and estrangement from others following the traumatic death of his wife, Daphne, vividly captures this experience.

As Armstrong (2000) astutely observes, that which is without familiarity is also without meaning. The traumatized person, therefore, is an exile, someone who is forced to live in a world that is no longer recognizable. It is a world in which hope itself may become a dreaded enemy. The feelings of expectation and desire that constitute hope, and which propel our lives toward some rosy future, can only be tolerated to the extent that experiences of uncertainty are also tolerable. When all certainty is exposed by trauma as a cruel myth and the future looks like a dark and barren wilderness, hope must be crushed lest it add further uncertainty to a future that is already unbearably precarious. As we shall see in the next chapter, some patients experience the hope implicit in the treatment situation as intolerably painful.

I can no longer think about traumas in my own life without recalling the morning of September 11th, 2001 when news of the falling World Trade Towers pierced the stillness of my office on the upper west side of Manhattan. Stunned by word of what only moments before would have been unimaginable, my world was instantaneously transformed. All that had once felt strong and solid grew suddenly insubstantial. Even the walls lost their sheltering thickness. They could no more block out the ghastliness of what had happened only miles away than the walls of the doomed towers could withstand the screaming impact of the hijacked planes. To say that life in the aftermath of trauma is fraught with uncertainty falls far short of capturing how I felt when I was thrust into a world in which nothing, not even myself, seemed familiar (Brothers 2002).

How is it that trauma plunges its victims into disorder of such magnitude that self survival becomes a matter of profound doubt? In Chapter Two I introduced the concept of systemically emergent certainties (SECs) which condense our beliefs about the conditions under which we expect our needs for a self-sustaining relational exchange to be met. Trauma, I believe, results when the certainties that emerge from and stabilize our relational worlds are destroyed by some experience that powerfully reveals their falsity. My certainty that my loved ones and I were safe from the ravages of terrorism as long we lived on American soil (no matter that many other acts of terror had already occurred under our noses) was a casualty of the terrorist attacks. Nancy’s certainty that she would be cherished unconditionally crumbled when her father insisted that she develop the qualities and appearance of a seductive Lolita. It is the destruction of the SECs that once lent stability, safety and meaning to our lives that turns us into exiles.

Upon the destruction of their SECs, terror, dread, and what Heinz Kohut (1971) so aptly called "disintegration anxiety" are usually easy to discern among the traumatized. But what I believe to be equally ubiquitous, although often harder to detect, is excruciating shame. More searing than fear, for me, in the aftermath of 9/11, was my own shame. I felt ashamed of having been reduced to trembling vulnerability, ashamed of having turned a blind eye to the conditions that spawned the attacks, ashamed of having done nothing to prevent them, and even ashamed of feeling ashamed. I am convinced that shame, while extraordinarily common, is one of the most painful of all human emotions. Deborah Thomas (2005) observes that a shame-ridden person not only feels inferior, deficient and unworthy, but also so exposed in this mortifying condition, he or she feels compelled to hide from view.

Goldberg (1991: xv) identifies shame as “one of the most complex and contradictory emotions with which the human race must come to terms. A consideration of some of the ways in which trauma and shame have been thought to be related brings home the truth of his assertion. Thomas (2005) observes that in both the trauma literature and the shame literature there is considerable agreement that trauma engenders shame insofar as feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, and vulnerability are commonly reported by traumatized individuals. I (Brothers 1995) suggested that shame is often felt among those who experience traumatizing betrayals of trust in themselves as providing selfobject experiences for others. At the same time, shame has itself been thought to be traumatizing (Levin 1967; Miller 1996; Severino et al (1987); Wurmser (1981/1994). Wurmser (1981) contends that both shameful disregard and neglect (soul blindness) and the shameful breaking of a child’s will (soul murder) are likely to be experienced as traumatic. Thomas (2005: 168), citing the work of Meares (2000), argues that shame is a form of trauma insofar as the shamed individual loses the ability for self reflection or what she refers to as “the loss of the unifying ‘I’. ”

When trauma is regarded as the destruction of certainty, its relationship to shame may be clarified further. Andrew Morrison (1994) asserts that among children 12 to 18 months of age, shame tends to accompany the disconfirmation of expectations that their selfobject needs will meet with attuned responsiveness. His assertion builds on Tomkins (1962, 1963) study of affects, according to which shame results from a rapid inhibition of excitement or interest, and Kohut’s (1971) notion that shame is part of the reaction to being “buffeted or ignored by nonattuned, understimulating, and inadequately responsive selfobjects” (Morrision 1994: 23). As I see it, the disconfirmation of expectation of selfobject fulfillment is exactly what happens when the certainties that organize our psychological lives (no matter what age we are at the time) are destroyed and the orderliness of the relational exchange gives way to chaos. If Morrison’s assertions are correct, then shame is an inevitable accompaniment to trauma. At the same time, because shame, that “sickness of the soul,” to use Tomkin’s (1963: 118) evocative description, brings with it a sense of shrinking from human contact, it magnifies the traumatized person’s experience of having been expelled from his or her relational homeland.

I think of Sam, a patient of mine who had difficulty leaving his apartment after the 9/11 attacks in New York. As the only child of authoritarian, demanding, anxiety-ridden parents, Sam believed that as long as he conscientiously obeyed those in power, no harm would befall him (we shall consider how our modifiable certainties become imbued with immutable certitude later in this chapter). This SEC colored his relationships outside of his family as well. He was convinced that as long as he fulfilled his obligations as a loyal citizen, he would be kept safe by governmental authorities. Once the faultiness of his belief was brutally exposed by the terrorist attacks, he dreaded venturing out into a world he no longer knew, a world without hope. Restricting himself to the confines of his apartment he attempted to cling to that which felt familiar, and therefore, safe. Several years later we discovered another reason that Sam had holed up his apartment: he could not bear the shame he felt when the events of 9/11 exposed his certainty as naive and erroneous.

AN EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING OF TRAUMA

My previous efforts to understand trauma, first with Richard Ulman in The Shattered Self (1988) and then on my own in Falling Backwards (1995) produced three ideas I still value: (1) trauma is relational; (2) trauma is a complex phenomenon involving both a shattering experience and efforts at restoration, and (3) trauma goes hand in hand with dissociation. I hope that by tracing the evolution of each of these ideas in turn, I will help to clarify my present understanding.

Trauma is Relational

According to the theory Richard Ulman and I developed (Ulman and Brothers 1988), trauma does not reside in a specific event such as a natural catastrophe or a malevolent act by a human, but rather in the meanings of that event for a given individual. Our conceptualization was relational to the extent that we believed that the traumatizing meanings of a given event shattered what we called "archaic narcissistic fantasies" or "central organizing fantasies of self in relation to selfobject" (we used the term selfobject to refer to another person experienced as providing self-sustaining experiences such as mirroring, idealized merger, and twinship). We thought of these fantasies as organizers of subjectivity in much the same way that intersubjectivity theorists view "invariant organizing principles" and what I am now calling systemically emergent certainties (See Chapter Two for a discussion of my changed view of fantasy).

In 1995 I refined this understanding by proposing that the meanings that are often traumatizing are those involving betrayals of trust in oneself and/or others to provide the selfobject experiences on which selfhood depends. I suggested that it is not selfobject experience per se that we cannot do without, but the confident expectation of engaging with others in relationships in which selfobject experiences can be shared. I used the term self-trust to designate the complex ways in which trust in self and in others organizes self-experience. I noted that we not only experience varying degrees of trust in others to provide us with selfobject experiences, but we experience varying degrees of trust in ourselves to elicit theseexperiences from others; we experience ourselves as more or less trustworthy in meeting the relational needs of others and others as more or less self-trusting. By postulating that it is the betrayal of any or all of these dimensions of self-trust that constitute the traumatizing meaning of some event, I placed even greater weight on the relational experience of trauma. I understood that it was the profound disruption in one's trusting relationships with others, not merely one's fantasies about oneself and others that shattered the organization of one's self-experience.

What distinguishes my present understanding from those I held in the past is my realization that trauma is such a complex phenomenon, a focus limited to the experience of a single individual (or even the experiences shared by two people) leaves too much out of the picture. While clinically, the experience of trauma must, of course, be considered from the perspective of the experiencing person or persons, the meanings that give rise to trauma, even those involving betrayals of trust, are not "owned" by the traumatized person; they are distributed throughout the interpenetrating systems in which that person's experience is embedded (Coburn 2002; Sucharov 2002). I like the way Kossman and Bullrich (1997) conceptualize the nature of these interpenetrating systems. They write:

It could be argued that only one system truly exists, the universal system, with all other systems representing subsystems embedded within this larger contextual field. The complexity of embedded systems cannot be captured by a simple hierachical model. Rather, what has been proposed as more accurate description of the interaction of subsystems is that of a heterarchy of parallel distributed systems (Grigsby & Schneiders 1991). (Kossman and Bullrich, 1997: 202)

My current view of trauma as the destruction of certainty attempts to take this heterarchy or network of systems into account. Not only do SECs themselves embody beliefs and expectations--that is, meanings--formed in the context of relational exchanges that occur throughout our interconnected systems, but the distress experienced upon their destruction is also widely dispersed throughout it. Under non-traumatic conditions, as I suggested in the last chapter, an expectation of going-on-being (which need not even be questioned) emerges in an individual as a property of the smooth and integrated functioning of regulatory processes that are involved in feeling, knowing, remembering, and so on. The horror of self-annihilation experienced by a traumatized person not only reflects disruptions within these processes and their failure to function together in a smoothly integrated way, but since the person's experience is intricately interconnected with that of others, that horror is, to some extent, felt by all involved.

According to systems theory, small fluctuations within systems can have widespread although unpredictable effects. This is variously known as the “butterfly effect” (the term was coined after an article suggested that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Rio could result in a hurricane in Texas [Kossman and Bullrich 1997]), “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (Masterpasqua and Perna 1997), or “order for free” (Piers 2000; Harris 2005). With the traumatizing destruction of even one individual's systemically emergent certainties, therefore, the threat of chaos looms for the entire heterarchy of relational systems in which his or her life is embedded.