Trauma of Human Making

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

Not every event that wounds the human psyche does so at the same level, or in the same register. A flood, a hurricane, a pandemic — these can deliver an emotional blow of the greatest severity, can strip a person of home, of safety, of everything they possess. But in events such as war, torture, massacre, repression, and organized violence, the danger and the harm arise from other human beings — from someone who has imposed the suffering, ordered it, justified it, or looked on in silence.

Human-made trauma is devastating not merely because it involves terror, pain, and helplessness. Such an experience can undermine our trust in human connection itself, in the dignity of a life, in the very possibility of taking refuge in another person, in the credibility of the shared world. This piece is concerned with the effects of traumas that arise from human will and intention.

In the previous post, I defined trauma as an intense emotional experience in which reality exceeds the psyche's capacity to bear, understand, and make meaning of it. Not all traumatic events, however, transform the psyche in the same way or at the same depth.

In traumas whose origin is largely non-human (earthquake, flood, pandemic) or accidental (a road accident, a fatal medical or operator error), the recognition that no personal intention lay behind the catastrophe is itself one of the factors that eases recovery. If we can accept that nature did not mean to insult, humiliate, or punish us — or that an accident born of human error might just as easily have happened to someone else — it becomes somewhat easier to come to terms with the traumatic event and, in time, to move past it.

But the mark left by traumas arising from the direct will of other human beings settles more deeply into the psyche. Such traumas are, in several respects, more complicated and more destructive than traumas of natural origin.

The Cruelty of the Human World

Human-made trauma is not only a traumatic event; it is also a traumatic relationship. Even when the agent of violence is not a single identifiable person but a group, an institution, an ideology, or a state, we are still, in some sense, dealing with a relationship — one in which one party expels a human subject, or a group of human beings, from the circle of protection, dignity, and humanity itself.

When persons or human institutions are the source of catastrophe, the one who suffers it is confronted with terrifying questions: How can it be that another human being — who has a body as I do, a mind as I do, needs and fears and hopes and longings as I do — could want my suffering in this way? How is it possible for someone to justify my pain and misery, or simply to remain indifferent to it? Why, and from what moment, did my safety and well-being come to matter so little?

In natural disaster, it is nature that comes to seem pitiless. In human violence, the natural world loses its former sense of safety, and, at the same time, other human beings are transformed into dangerous, malevolent beings.

Broken Covenant and the Feeling of Betrayal

Some theorists of trauma locate the essential suffering of human-made trauma not in physical pain, nor in the experience of terror, threat, and deprivation, but in the flagrant violation of what might be called the human covenant — the unwritten agreement that our bodies have a boundary; that our pain is not utterly without meaning to another; that a cry for help ought, in principle, to reach someone's ear; and that the institutions that act in the name of law, treatment, education, protection, or security are not themselves supposed to become the source of the threat.

Victims of war, massacre, torture, rape, humiliation, political repression, and organized violence live, chronically and continuously, with the danger of being expelled from this unwritten human covenant — with the possibility that someone may simply decline to count their suffering as suffering, may refuse to regard their life as equal in worth to their own, and may come to see them not as a respected and singular human being but as something of lesser value, or even as a dispensable object.

For this reason, such traumas invariably leave behind a deep sense of interpersonal betrayal. The closer the agent of violence stands to the position of protector, of law, of caregiver, the more acute the resulting sense of betrayal and insecurity becomes.

The person who has suffered discovers that the other not only fails to help but may himself become the very source of pain. Institutions such as the police, the courts, the media, and the law, and spaces such as hospitals, schools, and universities, come to serve threat or denial rather than the protection of life. It becomes difficult, or altogether impossible, to know whom one can approach, where to seek help, which hand extends aid and which betrays. This same mistrust makes the work of repairing trauma — which depends on turning to others for help — all the harder.

Dehumanization

A further complication of human-made trauma is that organized violence rarely occurs in raw form. Such violence becomes possible, as a rule, only after passing through a prior stage: dehumanization.

Before bodies are targeted, language and social perception are manipulated. Belonging to social, political, or religious groups, together with the influence of ideology, plays a significant role in stripping the "other" of humanity.

In this process, the victim falls from the standing of a singular human being and comes to be seen as an object of little worth — labeled dangerous, unclean, deceived, treacherous, or an agent of disorder.

Dehumanization sometimes proceeds gradually and quietly, but it is an essential prelude to the exercise of institutional violence. In the course of it, we lose our capacity for empathy with human suffering, our conscience grows numb, and violence becomes, for us, far easier to tolerate.

In order to harm a group of people, one must first separate "their" suffering from "our" suffering — must give it another, more acceptable name. In this way, the victim is expelled psychically and morally before ever being harmed physically. The righteous, worthy "we" then comes to regard the control or elimination of the inhuman, worthless "they" as justified, even necessary.

Shame and the Displacement of Responsibility

Beyond laying the groundwork for violence and further harm, dehumanization also carries catastrophic consequences at the level of inner experience and interpersonal life. The experience of being reduced from the rank of human being does not occur only in the mind of the persecutor or the persecuting group; it settles, as well, into the depths of the victim's own psyche.

Someone who has repeatedly been treated as though his existence were utterly without value to another may, as a result of this trauma, fail to develop — in the case of children — or may lose — in the case of adults — the inner resources needed to defend their own dignity.

It is worth remembering that our sense and definition of "self" is not fixed or rigid. We are continually recognizing and redefining ourselves, and for this we depend not only on personal experience and reflection but also on the gaze and the responses of others. Damage to the experience of being seen, of being taken seriously, of being recognized, distorts our sense of ourselves profoundly.

In such a state, the victim may, instead of a legitimate and well-founded anger, come to feel shame and humiliation instead. He may know, intellectually, that he was not at fault — and yet go on carrying, for a long time, in body and in mind, the traces of another's contemptuous or indifferent gaze.

Freeing oneself from this shame is extraordinarily difficult, because, in a wearing and relentless process, the persecuting individual or group, having already dehumanized the other and cast themselves as in the right, actively places the burden of responsibility for the trauma onto the victim.

"You brought this on yourself." "You should have been more careful." "If you hadn't done such-and-such, this wouldn't have happened to you." These are the familiar phrases we hear, again and again, offered in justification of human catastrophe by its perpetrators or their accomplices.

In sum, human catastrophes — unlike natural or accidental disasters — carry psychic, interpersonal, and collective layers of far greater complexity. They do not simply set in motion the cycle of emotional injury, followed by fear of its recurrence, followed by hypervigilance and avoidance, followed by the deepening of that injury. In this form of trauma, the more complicated emotions of shame, guilt, humiliation, betrayal, and mistrust of relationship itself play a decisive role as well.

In confronting human trauma, the question is never only "how do I calm myself and return to life?" A harder question remains, no less important, and one that eludes any direct answer: how is it possible to go on living in a world that has permitted such a crime to occur — that has allowed some to expel others from the circle of humanity simply because they wished to?

Payvand Jalali, Psychoanalytic Therapist