Stress and political decision making: A model of traumatic thinking and behavior in politics.
Trauma is the dysadaptive outcome of extreme stress. The thought and behavioral patterns associated with trauma are evident throughout the world--particularly in war torn regions. The impact of traumatic thinking and behavior is all around us. The model that follows provides one way to understand it.
Intrapsychic and Interactive trauma characteristics
Becoming "like" a traumatized individual means
adoption of that individual's intrapsychic representations
and interactive behaviors. In the contexts in which trauma
has been studied, recurring core beliefs and behaviors are
evident. These form the basis to determine whether
individuals and groups are exhibiting trauma behavior and
include:
1) Hypervigilance--characterized by generalized feelings of
myriad threats and anxiety about contradictory new
information.
2) Rigid beliefs--which are used to predict one's own and
others' behaviors and provide emotional distance from
those defined as enemy.
3) Rigid behaviors--including physical withdrawal and the
use of violence to control other's behaviors.
4) Information disruption--characterized by the
downgrading, discarding, or repressing of outside, past,
or internal sources of information. This mechanism
maintains and reinforces the rigid beliefs and
behaviors.
The pathological action of these core components damages
systemic integrity, reduces individual and systemic
autonomy, and results in events likely to confirm traumatic
representations.
When individuals feel generally anxious and
threatened, they are predisposed to perceive particular
events as threatening. Their hypervigilant state increases
the likelihood of a hostile response to others (Nye, 1973).
Childhood experiences of rigid discipline and punishment,
lack of love, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and an
atmosphere of tension and aggression in which the child
cannot express the experience of painful traumata, result
in a general perception of the world as a threatening
place. The restrictive, overwhelming, and unpredictable
nature of the early environment leaves the conscience
immature and predisposed to treat new information as
dangerous (Lasswell, 1977). As these individuals have
little room to experiment with new behavior, they become
emotionally fixed in childhood (Kritsberg, 1985).
Consequences in the adult include the development of
extreme cognitive distinctions and corollary authoritarian
behaviors in an attempt to control one's own and others'
behaviors. (Adorno et al., 1950; Frenkel-Brunswick, 1954;
Lipset, 1959; Rokeach, 1960; Miller, 1983, 1986).
Rokeach (1960) investigates this phenomenon based on a
belief/disbelief continuum. Beliefs are accepted truths
and disbeliefs are all rejected subsystems. Socially, this
is represented by an ingroup vs. a continuum of outgroups.
Groups protect themselves by shutting out other groups they
perceive as the enemy. At the same time, individuals
within the group are uncritically accepted. As a result,
extreme cognitive distinctions arise "between faithful and
unfaithful, orthodox and heretical, loyal and subversive,
...and friend and enemy" (p. 45). Paradoxically, as
intimacy with other groups or individuals is disrupted and
closure occurs, internal information is inhibited because
individuals, fearing expulsion, conform to group
expectations. When an individual or group becomes "closed
minded" in this way, authority is likely to be seen as
absolute.
In a traumatic response to an event, the individual's
closed belief system is reaffirmed. The core belief, that
the world is a hostile place, is revalidated, human
relationships are reaffirmed as unreliable, and the
individual's relationship to the ingroup is strengthened.
Antagonistic groups experience "tunnel vision" whereby each
stereotypes the other. These stereotypes are projected
onto outgroup members to predict behavior generating
prejudice and an expectation of hostility. Individuals
become concerned with duty to the ingroup and with meeting
group expectations, not with their own actions, thereby
providing a mechanism by which brutal actions toward
outgroups are implicitly or explicitly authorized (Kelman,
1973; Lifton, 1988). As the delusional systems interact,
the projections become self-fulfilling (Bettelheim, 1960).
Thus, rigid belief and behavior systems resulting from
human-induced disaster disrupt and/or suppress information
necessary for the growth and autonomy of individuals and
organizations. Deutsch (1966) identifies three
informational flows crucial to individual and social
well-being: 1) information from the outside world, 2)
information from the past, and 3) internal information. It
is characteristic of traumatized individuals that one or
all of these information flows is disrupted.
Childhood trauma is particularly insidious. Often
traumatic information from childhood is not consciously
suppressed; instead, it is buried in the unconscious by the
defense mechanism of repression. The repression of
childhood trauma can lead the individual to repeat
compulsively the trauma. As Alice Miller observes (1986),
"only in the intrapsychic world of the individual does the
past go on running its unwavering course and keep on being
enacted anew in his or her present surroundings" (p. 198).
Bettelheim noted the power of repressed trauma
when he wrote about Jewish children who were Holocaust
victims:
Why are the victims in the position of not being able to
speak about what happened to them in those days; why is
it still dreadfully difficult for them, even twenty or
thirty years later, to tell what they experienced as
children? And why is it so important that these things
be discussed? I am of the opinion that these two
questions are closely related. For something one cannot
talk about also cannot be buried, finds no resting
place. If one doesn't refer to it, the wounds continue
to fester from generation to generation. It is as
Raphael says: "The world must realize that these
deportations have branded us even into the third
generation".... All [the victim's children] have
suffered from their parents' inability to be open about
their experiences and the marks left
by them. (In Miller, 1986, p. 181)
The silence about what is seen and felt functions to
maintain rigid behavioral patterns in the family. However,
this results in the development of individuals who fear
their emotions and lack the basic skills to do "reality
checking" (Kritsberg, 1985, p. 20). In other words, their
internal information flow is distorted. This dynamic is
interjected through generations unless there is a healing
intervention.
Institutionally, information disruption is equally
pathological. Deutsch (1966) postulates that a system's
long-term prospects depend on the integrity of the three
informational flows. He defines integrity as "the
unimpaired functioning of the facilities that carry the
processes of self-determination" (p. 131). Cannon also
(1932) recognizes the importance of integrity when he
states, "the integrity of the organism as a whole rests on
the integrity of its individual elements, and the elements,
in turn, are impotent and useless save as parts of the
organized whole" (p. 309).
Integrity is impaired by disrupting information flows
from the past, from internal sources, or from external
sources, or by overloading a channel of informational flow.
The loss of integrity compromises systemic autonomy. The
system then loses "power to change goals and to add new
ones," and systemic survival becomes problematic (p. 140).
Information disruption destroys integrity and imperils the
organism's "health" by generating "pathological traffic
patterns" (Deutsch, 1966, p. 137). These pathological
patterns themselves become a source of disruption, and the
pathology becomes self-sustaining in the organism.
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