Responding to Violence

Bishop Dan's Blog of yesterday http://www.bishopdansblog.blogspot.com/ speaks of the dreadful violence that is prevalent throughout the world today. My personal belief as a clinician, and as an observer of life, is that a great deal of this violence is the result of traumatic stress disorder. A phenomenon that begins in utero. Salient symptoms of traumatic stress disorder among both children and adults are anxiety, panic, anger, violence, substance abuse, and mental illness. Traumas pile up. If a child is traumatized in early childhood (let's say by the death of a parent, violence within the home, etc) the trauma impacts the successful acheivement of what ever developmental milestone that child is going through at the moment. Unless the child receives help at that time, he/she is likely to be stuck at that developmental milestone. As a child, or adult, experiences more life trauma, the situations, left unattended, compound themselves. We have lots and lots of traumatized children, and adults, in the United States at this moment in time, with very few programs to identify or treat this serious issue. The same principle applies to our returning vets. They have been severely traumatized in one way or another during the course of their military service. They return home after having been in the midst of flying bullets, exploding rockets, and mutilated bodies, only to be told to turn in their uniform and gun and get a job. This approach is not working. The learned violence and the trauma of this war on terrorism hangs on and on perpetuating more violence.

We have a traumatized society. I have come to believe that until we think of ourselves in this light, we will only become more traumatized and more violent.