Chronic Trauma

This article was first published on the "Caesura" page.

Collective trauma is not always confined to a single overwhelming or short-lived catastrophe; it can also arise chronically, within an atmosphere of terror, insecurity, and ambiguity. This piece considers some of the mechanisms involved in the formation and persistence of chronic trauma.

Although the experience of protracted, grinding war can also produce traumatic responses resembling the chronic trauma under discussion here, my focus in this piece is on the relational dynamic between persecutors and victims within spaces — the home, the society — that are supposed, in principle, to be places of safety and calm.

Until just a few decades ago, the studies and diagnostic criteria concerned with trauma were focused largely on single, acute events. The more chronic forms of trauma have, increasingly, come to occupy the center of psychological study.

In acute trauma, the traumatic event takes the shape of a danger that occurs all at once; its impact is sudden, immediate, and closer to terror. In chronic trauma, by contrast, a person is placed within a pervasively dangerous atmosphere that produces an experience closer to captivity.

Whether chronic traumas occur within the family and interpersonal relationships (domestic violence, child abuse, child neglect, rape) or within the wider context of society (the repression of dissidents, political imprisonment, religious cults, organized sexual exploitation), they follow remarkably similar patterns.

The testimony of battered women, of hostages, of political prisoners, and of the victims of religious cults resembles one another so closely that some theorists draw no sharp line at all between "domestic captivity" and "political or social captivity."

In many cases, chronic social trauma begins with open, overwhelming violence: the persecuting group crushes dissent swiftly and brutally, opponents are pursued and persecuted, the sanctity of homes is violated, and families are confronted with the shock of unlawful arrest or the sudden disappearance of loved ones.

And yet physical violence is only the beginning of the story, and although it often continues, it is not the decisive element in the persistence of captivity. The continuation of social trauma requires the formation of a particular dynamic between the persecuting group and the persecuted group, whose core is control and domination. What follows are three of the most important instruments persecutors use to establish and sustain the captivity of their victims.

Unpredictability

For persecutors to establish dominance over their victims, they need to instill in them a constant, abiding sense of ambiguity. To this end, it serves them better that violence be not constant but arbitrary and unforeseeable. Vague laws, enforcers acting on unchecked discretion, and corrupt judges together produce an endless chain of threat, instability, and unpredictable humiliation.

For control to endure, it matters that the victim never know when or how punishment will arrive. Life may appear, on the surface, entirely ordinary, and yet the shadow of an undefined danger — a threatening phone call, an abduction, torture, imprisonment, even execution — follows constantly behind. The victim must arrive at the conclusion that resistance to the oppressor is futile, and that his life or death rests on the whim of someone, somewhere, within a structure of power he cannot locate.

Oscillation Between Punishment and Forgiveness

Persecuting individuals and institutions do not exercise control through fear and terror alone. They repeatedly drive their victims to the brink of total collapse and despair — and then, suddenly, "forgive" them.

In domestic violence this mechanism often operates unconsciously, but in a social and political context it becomes one of the principal instruments of repression. An interrogator who, after a long period of deprivation, restores to a prisoner the right to sleep, to move, to breathe fresh air, or to wear clean clothes, does so precisely in order to deepen the prisoner's dependence and tighten his control over the prisoner's mind. If this cycle continues long enough, the victim may reach a point where he comes to see his persecutor not only as the source of danger and threat but also as a source of deliverance.

This "amnesty" need not be announced as a formal government decree. Where the authorities regard themselves as owning the bodies, property, and conduct of citizens, and have severely restricted the possibilities of their lives, even the smallest opening functions as a powerful inducement.

None of this is meant, in any way, to diminish the civic gains that people living under oppression have won at enormous cost. Claiming ownership of such gains can genuinely strengthen a victim's sense of agency. And yet calculated incentives offered from above can also produce a kind of temporary forgetting.

Just as a battered wife may, in the wake of her aggressive husband's remorse and conciliation, forget the injuries done to the relationship — her psyche being, precisely because of the trauma, primed for this kind of dissociation and forgetting — so too may oppressed individuals and groups mistakenly attribute forgiveness handed down from above to some genuine change in their persecutors' conduct.

Isolation and the Manufacture of Dependency

As long as a victim retains a connection to the outside, the persecutor's power remains limited. The persecutor therefore works to sever the victim's sources of information and to destroy his material and emotional support. In the case of political prisoners, for instance, this is achieved by cutting off all contact with the outside world and instilling in the prisoner the belief that his comrades have betrayed him or forgotten him.

Censorship, internet blackouts, threats against families, information delivered only in scraps, a false official narrative, and the general insecurity of communication all combine to make people dependent, for their very understanding of reality, on the same space that has produced the trauma in the first place.

But isolation is not only external. The persecutor must also destroy the inner signs and reminders of connection. For this reason, he works to strip away names, symbols, and, ultimately, the collective memory and the narratives of the victims themselves.

Here lies the vital importance of protecting the symbols of resistance and keeping the narratives of victims alive. Without them, the persecuted individual or group finds itself alone with its persecutor, grows ever more dependent upon him, and suffers still further harm within the cycle of captivity.

The ultimate aim of these mechanisms is not merely to frighten victims but to build a world in which resistance appears futile and isolation appears natural.

Under conditions of chronic trauma, the psyche of the person who has been harmed waits, at every moment, for the next danger and the next blow; hopes, at every moment, for the persecutor to change; and, at every moment, stands at risk of losing its meanings and its connections to others.

Payvand Jalali, Psychoanalytic Therapist