Thanks for this, Nik.

Those of us who have worked in the “bowels” of our treatment facility see the brutal realities of those who fall through the cracks and then are ground up by the system. I found the DSM, if taken as a literal medical diagnosis, quite laughable. What happens really is that the “developmental nest” has many holes in it and many people fall through. And that shows up in many ways, as you note.

  I even wanted to propose a new category, which I did a blog on:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201508/pervasive-adult-developmental-disorder

  Note, I termed it Pervasive Adult Developmental Disorder. The emphasis should be on development and the failure of society to afford the necessary structures that enable it, as opposed to the individual’s problems being reducible to “broken biology”.

Best,
Gregg

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Nicholas Lattanzio
Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2021 10:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TOK Trauma, Othering, Culture, and Social Institutions

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Hey all,

I sort of channeled this rant this morning and thought it might generate some good discussion. By channeling I mean I was sitting there and started to type into my phone an idea that came into my head (the first few sentences) only to flow with the stream of consciousness until it stopped. I'm sure there is great deal of literature existing about the exact points I'm making (I know there is in fact), but I'm trying to organize this particular issue into a system of knowledge similar to what Gregg and other unifying/integrating theorists have and are doing. The underlying science in this example would be the biology of trauma and from there a very complicated epigenetic neuroplastic entanglement of interplays. Let me know what y'all think, all comments welcome (please keep any criticisms professional but  please do share them). Please forgive run-on sentences.


To walk into a situation or otherwise be presented with one in which the only thing standing between you and death is you, you can only walk away a changed person, accessed in a way not meant to be a natural state, that itself is incompatible with the way one "should" be in society, and is thus othered in a multitude of ways, not personally, merely a formality to dispose of those whom do not fit neatly into the half-duct taped box that is the modernist and postmodern clash. The individual can of course retaliate, protest and be labeled a delinquent, a criminal, an insurgent.



The individual can implode on themselves, destroying the part of themselves that helped them to survive because it now feels responsible for the rough and impulse-driven survival response and its unintended societal consequences, this is acheived in very different ways moderated namely by social institutions, more specifically the inequalities created and perpetuated by them such that those with less fall into the depths of the worst our society has to offer; drug addiction, the choice of which further moderated by predominantly monetary differences in family of origin (i.e., crack in the inner cities versus cocaine in the suburbs); prostitution and human trafficking, which is almost exusively reserved for the poor and easily victimized/groomed, or the unfortunately kidnapped; even violence towards themselves and others, again which seems to have some relationship with proximity to thers (or at least the number of others in a certain proximal range) so that we see the inner cities, where individuals are too closely compacted in minimal consideration of the empirically reliable expectations for what is the likely outcome in such a cluster of deeply and severely affected individuals (i.e., violence and increasing/exacerbated pathologies) and, conversely -- though not as strongly bilateral in relationship as aforementioned second-order effects of survival-engaged/life-threatening experiences -- the suburbs are more affected (by proportion, not quite number) by the internalization of societal alienation and ostracism, leading to excessive opioid addictions and self-harm where the path more often taken (though again the trend here is more evening out than some others) is to remove the pain by removing/taking it out on oneself versus removing/take it out on others.



This is how the traumatized go through their lives, this is how our society takes care of the wounded, due to its organization and cutthroat self-sustenance. So when one's life is threatened or is at least in a situation perceived in such a manner, their survival in the moment effectively becomes their everyday survival (in the absence of properly timed and oriented interventions). One walks into a situation that, should they walk out of, prompts a lifetime of running from oneself and others. Either that, or one does not walk away. Is the true burden here on those who are fortunate (?) enough to survive? Or those who don't, and who's families and loved one's then adopt a sense of victimhood at the situation, not realizing the potentially tortuous life that may have remained for that individual, and that the truly sad aspect is that the individual who walked into that situation in which there life was threatened, never did walk out, never could have. Once the survival response is engaged in an acute manner, their way of being in the world shifts in priority, losing the sense of security that for most has been taken for granted and is truly more of a sense than an actual security, such as is defined by trauma.


This is no argument for a euthanasia-style approach to trauma, clearly that is the inhumanity left for the horses with broken legs, god forbid we use our god/evolution-given skills in applied physics to contrive a method by which a horse could at all feasibly heal a broken leg (forget about the racing future). In animals here we treat them more as a commodity than a living thing. But while we don't euthanize the traumatized, nor do they tend to be able to race again -- maybe a jog though depending on the severity of the trauma and the nature of the individual's idiosyncratic race of sport (how well and in what way they are an involved and contributing member of society)-- they are disregarded as if they are in fact dead or are treated as if they should be able to run their respective race on a broken or at best bandaged leg; which is obviously quite absurd.



And when they almost invariably can't run that race (at least for long in an effective way that isn't also slowly killing them inside, a different trajectory not to be explored here)? We conveniently blame them when they return to maladaptive sources of coping such as substance use, self-harm, or gang affiliation (protection, structure, family) as individuals whose morality and character were never "right" or are "unsalvageable." The sick joke of it all is that that attitude is more the cause of those maladaptive behaviors than the actual traumatic event such that the stigma becomes retraumatizing, exponentially so in the lack of proper therapeutic and community interventions, and the drugs, the razor, the gun become the support that society needs to be for these people. They are not even "these" people, and i should hope most on this listserv agree with me in saying that they are "our" people regardless individual differwnces in race, creed, sex, gender, etc.


I have loosely described a framework that addresses the dominance of social institutions in the maltreatment of the traumatized and "damaged." The dominance that is meant to exist to protect us when life comes and knocks us down so hard we truly can't get up on our own, not all the way at least. Instead these institutions have been corrupted, and only exist to maintain the benefits (detriments to most of us) of the corruption (e.g., reallocation of resources) by setting a moral stage to demonize the damaged in the eyes of those who behold little awareness of the vast ancillary and tertiary implications of the intersection of cultures, policies, evolution, and human wellbeing/service to others. The institutions conflate these things to create the cognitive dissonance which will, by virtue of the path of least resistance, almost always result in the doubling down on one's belief system versus a change in behavior, which in this case would be the mobilization of community efforts to provide essentials and help to those in need who are outside of one's immediate cultural group but are still close enough that their (the damaged) existence is already heavily tied into their (the in group  people) beliefs, mores, values, etc.


Example: White suburban upper-middle class grassroots organization to help organize the structured allocation of resources and service provision to inner city, minority, drug-addicted youth with criminal histories.




Regards,

Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
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