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DECEMBER 2, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Are We Traumatized? By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
S
o there I was, trying to attend to all the needs of my clients, write an article for you (of course) and keep on top of my very active Facebook group when I received a text message from my late husband’s, a”h, friend, Don, in Florida. Don is an oncologist who is very health conscious. We – meaning me, my husband, and kids – would kind of joke around back in the day, when we would invite him for Shabbos and he would only eat organic food. That is, the joking went on until I ended up sick over a year ago with this crazy auto-immune disease of my mouth and lost 16 pounds because I was in too much pain to eat. I tried the Gundry diet for a whole year which didn’t work (and it didn’t change my thyroid numbers either) but – interestingly – when I gave up on it, I, too, stayed with organic food as much as possible. So sometimes your emotional experiences are so powerful that they forever influence your choices. Oddly enough, that was exactly the topic of the text that Don had sent me. It was a link to an interview on Oval Media with a trauma recovery coach, Meredith Miller, whose focus is on relational trauma. Because all of the work that I’ve been sharing with you for some time now is based on the idea of the effects of trauma on people and all the research I had done over the years is in this area, I thought that what Miller would be saying was not going to be new. Yet, I tuned in out of respect for my friend, Don. But Miller had an unusual take on trauma: We are in the midst of national trauma, she said. Wow, although what’s in the news bothers me terribly and I have been trying to tune it out, I never
thought of this epoch we are in as traumatic. I tuned in to hear more. Miller began her presentation saying things I could agree with – for example, that you can’t tell an abuse victim that they’re being abused if they feel they still love the person who is abusing them. It doesn’t work because their emotions override the logic and they will simply find explanations for each instance you give them trying to prove they’re being abused. The same dynamic is happening at a societal level, Miller explains. People want to believe our government is there to protect us. However, when the pandemic hit, our government started a “hypnotic induction” through the use of language, she says. (In the world of hypnosis, many people’s brains are full of chatter that needs to be quieted first, so the therapist would provide a running commentary suggesting a person’s body relax or their thoughts go to a nice place or to some interesting metaphorical story that would cap-
ture their attention. That is a hypnotic induction.) She points out that the term “social distancing” was the beginning of a hypnotic induction into the trance we are in now. How does that work? Those words create cognitive dissonance. (Cognitive dissonance is the emotional experience of some distress when two ideas cannot go together. This discomfort forces a person to change the meaning of at least one of the terms or ideas in their own mind.) Continuing with her example, “social” implies connection. As humans, we want that connection. She says it makes us feel safe. I’m not so sure about that part, though. For some people, being connected is scary. But it certainly does mean “connection.” The word “distancing,” of course, is the opposite of connection. This is why the two words, when put together, lead to cognitive dissonance. In order to resolve this uncomfortable feeling, the words must mean something different from what they
originally meant. The way that people have been handling this is to go into “denial” that there is a problem with the terminology in the first place. Another person on the panel was Dr. Reiner Fullmich, a consumer protection attorney. He described an interview he conducted with a Holocaust survivor, Aviva Scharaff, who was discussing the use of euphemisms to mislead people, and he thought that the term “social distancing” is an example of that. Viviane Fischer was also a panelist. She, too, is an attorney and also an economist. She wanted to know how Miller could compare a love relationship to the relationship citizens have with their government. Miller explained that both relationships begin with love bombing. So, in the case of government, we are receiving economic stimulus money and, some of us, free food. Add to that the government’s assurance that “we want the best for you.” But there is another part to the abuse cycle, Miller said, and that is the devaluation: “you’re dirty, you’re sick.” Abusers also will pull back their abuse if they see that their victim is coming out of denial by the overwhelming nature of the abuse. So, too, the government has seen people objecting to the lockdowns, so they set people free for a while. But they are cycling back to the abuse now, with lockdowns in many countries. Fischer was curious to know if Miller thought this whole cycle was intentional and planned. Miller responds with a bit of history that I was not aware of. Apparently, after World War II, the United States brought over hundreds of Nazi scientists and put them to work in government organizations.
