Protracted Uncertainty

 

I was listening to the podcast "On Being with Krista Tippett" yesterday. She was interviewing the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score.  Among other things, he was talking about the way we humans store trauma in our bodies.  This is nothing new to humanity, but what struck me was his observations of the USA  in the wake of this ongoing pandemic. 

Among other things, he said:

"So we have these two different parts of our brain, and they’re really quite separate. So we have our animal brain that makes you go to sleep and makes us hungry and makes us turned on to other human beings in a sexual way, stuff like that. And then we have our rational brain that makes you get along with other people in a civilized way. These two are not all that connected to each other. And so, the more upset you are, you shut down your rational part of your brain.

When you look at the political discourse, everybody can rationalize what they believe in and talk endlessly about why what they believe is the right thing to do, while your emotional responses are totally at variance with seemingly rational behaviors. We can talk till we’re blue in the face, but if our primitive part of our brain perceives something in a particular way, it’s almost impossible to talk ourselves out of it, which, of course, makes verbal psychotherapy also extremely difficult, because that part of the brain is so very hard to access."

I kept thinking of the major damage Donald Trump and his cohorts in the media have done to the ability to accept truth - empirical truth-  to at least half of the people in our country.

Dr. van der Kolk remarked: 

", we’re still sort of flabbergasted by these recent developments, and the world is a completely different place now and no longer a place that is trustworthy, in a way. The world is much more unsafe and unclear, and we don’t know who’s on our side, who’s not on our side, who’s telling the truth, who’s not telling the truth — it’s a very radical disintegration of something."

Krista Tippett responds:

"And we’ve pretty much, to a person, been really upset now for a long time, right? [laughs] I mean, some of us, some of us have had firmer, steadier ground beneath our feet, but, you know, I’ve thought about this protracted uncertainty, which our bodies do not do well with. And our animal brains do not — it wreaks havoc with our animal brains, right? I’ve almost felt like that is, again, maybe perhaps not trauma, but traumatizing. I don’t know."

Dr. Van der Kolk replies:

"so I think that people with prior history of trauma have a much harder time right now. There’s a tremendous increase in domestic violence and in child abuse, of people not feeling safe with each other anymore and not being able to do the sort of things that makes your body feel safe, like going to the movies, [laughs] — very simple stuff, you know, standing on line to get an ice cream — just that sort of — how we move rhythmically, with other people."

but he also notes that our present technology has been a help to us in this time:

"We all say negative things about Zooming and stuff, but you know, my family was very deeply affected by the pandemic in 1918, 1919. It was devastating. And I think about them all the time. They didn’t have Zooms. They didn’t have telephones. They couldn’t stay in touch with people. And I think about how much worse it must have been for people back there — and I know, because my parents were very, very hurt people, as a consequence — and how great it is that I speak to my friends in Australia once a week, and I speak to my friends in San Francisco every other week. And there’s still that capacity to see each other’s faces and to still have your heart open to people around you. So let’s not say all negative things about Zoom, because it has made a tremendous difference for the better, also."

anyway , this conversation on this podcast has given me much to think about.