A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [166]
She continued, "The third group of symptoms people have— and these are almost the opposite of the intrusive nightmares and flashbacks, the dramatic symptoms—is a shutting-down of feelings, a constriction of emotions, intellect, and behavior. It's characteristic of traumatized people to oscillate between feeling overwhelmed, enraged, terrified, desperate, or in extreme grief and pain, and feeling nothing at all. People describe themselves as numb. They don't feel anything, they aren't interested in things that used to interest them, they avoid situations that might remind them of the trauma. You, for example, probably avoided waterskiing in order to avoid the traumatic memories. Waterskiing may not be much to give up, but people sometimes avoid relationships, they avoid sexuality, they make their lives smaller, in an attempt to stay away from the overwhelming feelings."
"What happens," I asked, thinking not just of myself, "if a person is traumatized repeatedly or systematically?"
"People begin to lose their identity, their self-respect. They begin to lose their autonomy and independence.
"Because people in captivity are most often isolated from other relationships—that this is so in normal captivity is obvious and intentional, but it is overwhelmingly the case in domestic violence as well, as perpetrators often demand their victims increasingly cut all other social ties—they are forced to depend for basic survival on the very person who is abusing them. This creates a complicated bond between the two, and skews the victim's perception of the nature of human relationships. The situation is even worse for children raised in these circumstances, because their personality is formed in the context of an exploitative relationship, in which the overarching principles are those of coercion and control, of dominance and subordination.
"Whether we are talking about adults or children, it often happens that a kind of sadistic corruption enters into the captives emotional relational life. People lose their sense of faith in themselves, in other people. They come to believe or view all relationships as coercive, and come to feel that the strong rule, the strong do as they please, that the world is divided into victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. They believe that all relations are contaminated and corrupted, that sadism is the principle that rules all relationships."
"Might makes right," I said. "Social Darwinism. The selfish-gene theory. Original Sin. You've just described the principles that undergird our political, economic, scientific, and religious systems."
"And there are other losses involved. A loss of basic trust. A loss of feeling of mutuality of relatedness. In its stead is emplaced a contempt for self and others. If you've been punished for showing autonomy, initiative, or independence, after a while you're not going to show them. In the aftermath of this kind of brutalization, victims have a great deal of difficulty taking responsibility for their lives. Often, people who try to help get frustrated because we don't understand why the victims seem so passive, seem so unable to extricate themselves or to advocate on their own behalf. They seem to behave as though they're still under the perpetrator's control, even though we think they're now free. But in some ways the perpetrator has been internalized."
All of the traditional Indians I have spoken with have mentioned the importance to each of us to decolonize our minds, removing the internalized messages of the dominant culture.
Judith said, "Captivity also creates disturbances in intimacy, because if you view the world as a place where everyone is either a victim, a perpetrator, an indifferent or helpless bystander, or a rescuer, there's no room for relationships of mutuality, for cooperation, for responsible choices. There's no room to follow agreements through to everyone's mutual satisfaction. The whole range of cooperative relational skills, and all the emotional fulfillment that goes with them, is lost. And that's a great deal to