Psychological Trauma - A Simple Internal Model

	The 'Socially Acceptable Violence' Project: Trauma - A Simple Internal Model ©2003 John Latter (jorolat@msn.com)

The 'Socially Acceptable Violence' Project:

Trauma - A Simple Internal Model

[All drafts will be expanded upon once the basic framework has been established]

Direct entry to this page? While it can be read by itself this is section 3 of the "Socially Acceptable Violence" project. Other sections can be accessed via the links on the main project entry page: click here.

[Visit the "Socially Acceptable Violence" Discussion Egroups associated with the project at Yahoo and Msn]

Contents of Section 3 "Trauma - A Simple Internal Model":

3) Trauma - A Simple Internal Model [1st Draft: 9th August '03]

3a) Preamble
3b) The Model
3c) A Basic 'Communication Problem' Between Child and Adult
3d) The Model Revisited[1st Draft: 15th August '03]

3d.1) Further notes on Pre-trauma
3d.2) Further notes on Trauma [1st Draft: 15th August '03]

3d.2a) Resolution of Trauma: Flowchart [1st Draft: 25th August '03]

3d.2a.1) Notes on the Flowchart

3d.2b.1a) Preparation phase (Part 1) [1st Draft: 27th August '03]
3d.2b.2b) Contact phase
3d.2b.3c) Contact unsuccessful
3d.2b.4d) Contact successful

3d.2a.2) Reaching the Primal Anger: "The Soldier's Story"

3d.3) Further notes on Compounding a Trauma
3d.4) Further notes on Erosion [1st Draft: 9th September '03]

3d.4a) "Hardly Worth Mentioning" [1st Draft: 9th September '03]
3d.4b) Basic Interaction between Abuser and Victim
3d.4c) To be decided

3d.5) Further notes on The Professional Abuser
3d.6) Further notes on 'Mental Illness'

3a) Preamble [Back to Top]

This section briefly introduces an internal model and then applies it to a real-life example in order to identify a basic conflict situation that infants/toddlers may encounter when in a social environment, This approach will then enable the real-life examples used in "The Model Revisited" to be seen in their intended context.

3b) The Model [Back to Top]

Pre-Trauma Pre-Trauma (Figure 1): The contents of the glass represent the natural capacity for life within a human being unaffected by trauma, and although not a function of age, it is a state of being most frequently encountered in babies and infants (nb developing or developed intellectual capabilities can be considered to be located towards the top of the glass).

Trauma Trauma (Figure 2): "There's no such thing as a free lunch" and once a trauma occurs the capacity for life is reduced. Even when formed inadvertently, interaction with the surface of the wound will bring awareness of those who have the potential to inflict such harm. Instinctive attempts to reverse the injury often occur and are made possible because of the initial internal differentiation. Note that the 'primal' anger (in red) is on the other side of the wound and not 'below' as the diagram tends to infer.

Compounded Trauma Compounding a Trauma (Figure 3): "The straw that breaks the Camel's back" and the accumulated effect of post-traumatic experiences causes all attempts at recovery to be abandoned. The degree of repression increases at the time of (or soon after) capitulation resulting in a compounded trauma.

Erosion Erosion (Figure 4): Further erosion may occur throughout childhood and/or adulthood.

The Professional Abuser The Professional Abuser (Figure 5): .The appropriate section describes how the determining factor is not the degree of repression but rather the degree of surface compression coupled with the orientation of the self to that compression.

Mental Illness Mental Illness (Figure 6): A more frequently occuring condition than is generally realized owing to the historical and evolutionary reasons commented upon in the Conclusion. When individuals who have accrued this degree of harm come to the attention of Society they may be categorized as suffering from one of the more intractable forms of "Mental Illness".

The transition from Glass A to Glass F is only sequential in terms of the acccumulation of repression and not in terms of how an individual may react with it. In a worst case scenario, for example, a child could go from Figure 1 to Figure 6 and never have the time to develop any of the 'personality traits' associated with any stabilized intermediate stage.

3c) A Basic 'Communication Problem' Between Child and Adult [Back to Top]

"The Rainbow Effect"

There were perhaps half-a-dozen other people, in addition to myself, who were sitting on benches that ran down one side of the room. Above our heads sunlight streamed in through large open windows. On my left sat Darren, a child of about two years of age, and to his left sat Arthur, a forty year-old man who was so engrossed in a crossword that he had forgotten about a cigarette burning away in an ashtray. Darren's father stood in front of us chatting amicably with three of his friends.

The smoke from the cigarette rose vertically into the air but didn't really become visible until it entered the shaft of sunlight and turned into a column of deep blue, slowly twisting this way and that in response to unseen movements of air within the room.

Darren was obviously captivated by the sight and so I leaned across and gently blew towards the smoke to make it dance a little more. I then sat back to look at the child in full anticipation that he would want to do the same.

Pursing his lips in an unfamiliar way Darren stretched upwards to blow, and as he did so, a fine spray of saliva was launched into the air. When the spray reached the shaft of sunlight it became transformed into hundreds of tiny transparent globules, each with a shimmering rainbow arcing down one side, that rose to a peak before falling lightly away. Darren sat back and stared in astonishment, but even as he took a deep breath and began leaning forward to do it again, all four adults standing in front of our table turned towards him, and in varying degrees of severity, said "Naughty!"

Two of the voices lagged slightly, perhaps they were just following the lead of the others, but after she had said "Naughty" to Darren the owner of the 'severest' tone then glared at me to indicate that my complicity in the crime hadn't gone unnoticed. Darren stared at each adult in turn, turned to look at his father in blank incomprehension, and made no further movement towards the smoke.

[Index of all Real-Life examples]

Basic Communication Problem Figure 7: The presence of a psychological history will affect perception of, as much as response to, any natural reality. In this instance the adults were unable to recognize natural behaviour originating from below the level of the dotted line within the child simply because they no longer experienced it themselves.

Natural v Unnatural Figure 8: Darren's positive response to the natural phenomena had been instinctive and uninhibited. The behaviour of the adults, on the other hand, was not only egocentric but also entirely negative owing to inner reactions with, and the restrictions imposed by, acquired psychological histories.

Natural Development Figure 9: The foregoing makes no distinction between child and adult insofar as one independent being has a natural equivalence with any other. If development is taken into account, however, then the continuity involved in the transition from child to adult is reflected in Figure 9: even if instinctive recognition of what the child was doing had become attenuated by the time it reached the cognitive level of the adults it should still have been there.

The potential for conflict is self-evident: if Darren had persisted in his natural exploration of the "rainbow effect" then the adults would have reacted even more 'negatively'. The lead role would have been left to the father and harsher tones, physical restraint, and perhaps even 'punishment' may have followed.

Note that two of the adults, including (significantly) the woman with the severe tone, were unknown to the child, and that from Darren's point of view, a sizable percentage of the observable world's entire population had behaved in a way for which natural inheritance had no response.

A wider perspective can be gained on the issues involved by referring to a 2001 press release (click here) which reported a proposal that rape may be an 'evolutionary strategy' owing to the apparent fact that "A single act of rape may be more than twice as likely to make a woman pregnant as a single act of consensual sex".

The internal model is based on the natural integration of human beings and the disruption to integration that can occur. Implicit in this approach is recognition of the fact that human beings are also individuals.

It will be interesting (when time permits) to see to what degree the authors of the suggestion that rape may be an evolutionary strategy differentiated between 'types' of rapists within their data.

For example, it has been consistently observed that when an act of psychological violence containing a sexual element occurs in a social environment then that element either appears after the perpertrator (male or female) believes psychological control has been established, or it manifests itself as a secondary feature during the process of establishing that control (in effect, "a promise of things yet to come"). [Real life examples will be included here or links provided to where they appear in later pages]

References aren't to hand at the time of writing this draft but it has been recognized by those who work with the victims of sexual violence that "Rape isn't about sex, its about control". Specifically, psychological control:

Figure 10: Consider a man whose post-trauma experiences, resulting in the degree of accumulated harm indicated, were such that they have now left him with an unacknowledged potential for rape. He begins a romantic encounter with an initially willing partner, but at some point the woman declines any further intimacy. For the purposes of this exercise this is one (and not necessarily sexual) rejection too many and his internal reaction against the surface of the compounded trauma causes the existing adjustment to fracture. The sudden discharge of repression is then channelled ('complicity' of the ego) into a violent act of rape.

Because this type of rape is a function of an injury to natural life, rather than of natural life itself, then there isn't any direct connection with the 'evolutionary process' - irrespective of whether one believes in Neo-Darwinism, Intelligent Design, or more natural and testable possibilities such as those speculated upon by Pierre-Paul Grassé (alt. Grasse) and others.

It will be equally interesting to see if the authors of the proposal gave consideration to how an organism in extremis responds under different, and non-sexual, circumstances.

"Trauma in Infants" (not yet linked) describes how 'naughtiness' can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and the incident involving Darren demonstrates how inappropriate the conditioned responses of adults can be. This 'mismatch' will appear in many of the real-life examples but the point being made at the moment is that, if any 'crime' were involved in the exploration of the rainbow effect, then it was only the adults who had the potential to commit it. And furthermore, it would have been a crime not just against the individual, but like the imaginary scenario of rape, against the nature of life itself: a violation of the innate right of the individual simply to Be.

[Note: Darren will reappear later in an incident in which he nearly became the final recipient of a wave of 'socially acceptable violence' that rippled down through a Psychological Hierarchy after being initiated by the Professional Abuser at the head.]

[Back to Top]

Return to Introduction and/or Characteristics of Psychological Trauma

Next Section: The Model Revisited

Return to The 'Socially Acceptable Violence' Project main entry page

Return to the Evolution, Psychology, and Social Psychology homepage

[Visit the "Socially Acceptable Violence" Discussion Egroups at Yahoo and Msn]

"Words frozen in time should be differentiated from those carved in stone" - John Latter

[Part of the "Model of an Internal Evolutionary Mechanism" Group of Websites]

Model of an Internal Evolutionary Mechanism

linking Stationary-Phase Mutations to The Baldwin Effect

		Pre-Trauma (Figure 1): The contents of the glass represent the natural capacity for life within a human being unaffected by trauma, and although not a function of age, it is a state of being most frequently encountered in babies and infants (nb developing or developed intellectual capabilities can be considered to be located towards the top of the glass).


		Trauma (Figure 2): "There's no such thing as a free lunch" and once a trauma occurs the capacity for life is reduced. Even when formed inadvertently, interaction with the surface of the wound will bring awareness of those who have the potential to inflict such harm. Instinctive attempts to reverse the injury often occur and are made possible because of the initial internal differentiation. Note that the 'primal' anger (in red) is on the other side of the wound and not 'below' as the diagram tends to infer.


		Compounding a Trauma (Figure 3): "The straw that breaks the Camel's back" and the accumulated effect of post-traumatic experiences causes all attempts at recovery to be abandoned. The degree of repression increases at the time of (or soon after) capitulation resulting in a compounded trauma.


		Erosion (Figure 4): Further erosion may occur throughout childhood and/or adulthood.


		The Professional Abuser (Figure 5): .The appropriate section describes how the determining factor is not the degree of repression but rather the degree of surface compression coupled with the orientation of the self to that compression.


		Mental Illness (Figure 6): A more frequently occuring condition than is generally realized owing to the historical and evolutionary reasons commented upon in the Conclusion. When individuals who have accrued this degree of harm come to the attention of Society they may be categorized as suffering from one of the more intractable forms of "Mental Illness".
The transition from Glass A to Glass F is only sequential in terms of the acccumulation of repression and not in terms of how an individual may react with it. In a worst case scenario, for example, a child could go from Figure 1 to Figure 6 and never have the time to develop any of the 'personality traits' associated with any stabilized intermediate stage.

		Figure 7: The presence of a psychological history will affect perception of, as much as response to, any natural reality. In this instance the adults were unable to recognize natural behaviour originating from below the level of the dotted line within the child simply because they no longer experienced it themselves.


		Figure 8: Darren's positive response to the natural phenomena had been instinctive and uninhibited. The behaviour of the adults, on the other hand, was not only egocentric but also entirely negative owing to inner reactions with, and the restrictions imposed by, acquired psychological histories.


		Figure 9: The foregoing makes no distinction between child and adult insofar as one independent being has a natural equivalence with any other. If development is taken into account, however, then the continuity involved in the transition from child to adult is reflected in Figure 9: even if instinctive recognition of what the child was doing had become attenuated by the time it reached the cognitive level of the adults it should still have been there.