Escaping Planetary Oppression Mechanisms

Escaping Planetary Oppression Mechanisms:

Part 2

Confronting "Impossible Choices"

In Creating Sanctuary—an excellent study of trauma theory—pioneering psychiatrist Sandra Bloom summarizes the abused child’s plight:

Children are helplessly dependent on their caregivers. In order to survive, they must trust those on whom they depend. When those caregivers turn out to be untrustworthy, children must deny this reality. Often this betrayal is denied or minimized by the perpetrator as well as by other family members and other members of the child’s community. This means that the experience of individual reality becomes increasingly divergent from cultural reality. ... The child, in such a situation, must make a choice. Deny your individual reality and fit into the culture, or deny the cultural beliefs and end up alone and eccentric or even “crazy.” It is an impossible choice (p. 38).

Let’s shift gears up from the abused child to the abused citizen—who, once upon a time, was a child. This means, for most of us, that we were born in a hospital, where, just as we come out of a safe place, desperately needing comforting and nourishment, we get punched, prodded, and lacerated by people in white uniforms who then drag us away from potentially comforting parents to a room with a bunch of other traumatized kids screaming their heads off in terror. We get to visit the parents sporadically, but we’re dragged back to the noisy prison after every visit. Eventually, the parents rescue us.

If we’re lucky, we reconnect with those parents and bond with them—that is, if they’re not absent (emotionally or physically) or abusive. Even if the parents aren’t abusive, though, abusive experiences are always a possiblity in our day-to-day baby existence: having to follow someone’s schedule, sleeping by ourselves in some retention area, being put behind bars, babbled at (when we can understand what’s being said—see David Chamberlain’s The Mind of Your Newborn Baby), and occasionally yelled at (when all we want is relief from some pain).

After we work that one out—whether we get a real relationship with parents and siblings, or, as Patrick Carnes observes in many cases, a trauma bond (see his book The Betrayal Bond)—we head off to school. Of course, it’s taken us a while to figure out why we do this. Up to this point, we’ve learned by playing and exploring. But we’re told that school will be better. So, we set off with high hopes and trepidation (we’re being asked to leave our family, the source of our security). Will these new people take care of us? Will the new places be safe?

Over the years, we discover the difference between good teachers and bad teachers, between good administrators and bad administrators, between friends and bullies—and it’s anything but an easy road. We discover right away that this is an authoritarian place. Everyone expects obedience, and there are terrible consequences if we don’t obey. Everyone expects conformity too, which includes thinking the way the teacher says and then letting our parents know how wonderful the teacher is, whether it’s true or not. We learn, in fact, that truth is defined by authority status and that children do not have it.

For instance, one of us went to an elementary school in southeastern Pennsylvania where a first-grade teacher named Miss Brown ruled her classroom with efficient brutality. The effects were plain to see in all the terrified children. The most sensitive ones still had “learning disabilities” years later, thanks to Miss Brown. One still couldn’t read in fifth grade, and several were bed-wetters for years. But when the children mentioned anything to the parents and the parents came to view Miss Brown’s classroom, she was a model of gentle pedagogy, so the children must be lying.

On top of such abuses of power and authority, we head off to school looking for creativity and cooperation (almost every study about young schoolchildren confirms this), and we get instead competition and conflict, masquerading as the grading system. And a bell-curve one at that, mandating an elitist system in which a few (those who could adapt to the system best) are on top, most fall in the middle (we become the “masses” when we get older, which is a kind of promotion from “pupils”), and a few fail (and resent it), allowing the system to have scapegoats so that no one notices the system’s structural flaws—how it creates mediocrity and scapegoats.

Playground peer groups mirror the elitist world set up by the grading system. The stratifying system needs someone to focus the anger, so there’s always a bully, ignored and in some cases encouraged by the authorities. The bully further abuses us or, if he or she happens to be clever, humiliates us.

Having been indoctrinated into this system and having learned how to cope in it, we scarcely notice when our work lives reflect it as well. In fact, if we do notice it, we think, gee, this must be the inevitable order of things, a Darwinian natural law of society: the authorities control and tell us what to do, even if we’re “professionals.” We hear about democracy, of course, but the minute we get hired, we walk in the front door and the Bill of Rights goes out the back. The authority structure, the reward system, the bully: they’re all here. It’s abusive, but by this time, it’s familiar.

More than familiar, it’s something we identify with. A side-effect of abusive systems—as researchers such as Sandra Bloom and Patrick Carnes point out—is that we tend to bond with our abusers. We accept and embrace them, abuse and all. As a child, what other choice did we have? The little child in us is back at home or at school thinking, “I need these authority figures or structures to survive, so I’d better go along with them.” Only now it’s so unconscious that we simply take on the attitudes and behavior of the abusers (even if it’s a whole system that holds us prisoners, as Peter Senge noted in The Fifth Discipline).

To keep our souls from crying out against this betrayal of our best interests by those who claim to be acting “for our own good,” we form an emotional attachment to the abusers. They must, after all, have our interests at heart and we just don’t realize it. Maybe we deserve to be treated that way. Maybe it’s what we need to do our best. Maybe we should just accept our lot in life and make the best of it. Certainly complaining has only brought charges of “cry-baby” and admonitions not to blame others for suffering that’s really our own fault. Uh huh. It’s all very handy for keeping everyone in their stratified place.

Oddly enough, in spite of the thoroughness of this indoctrination-and-bonding system, we periodically feel something else coming through, something we experience as a deeper identity, a presence beneath all the abuse, a soul perhaps or a deeper sense of self. And this deeper part of us doesn’t know why we should be treated this way. It doesn’t believe that we are the stupid masses, needing to be controlled. It doesn’t see why we should think the way everyone else does. It doesn’t even think that the world is a meaningless, dark, and evil place (which is the worldview that the indoctrination system creates, leading us to cling to its structures as if they’re our only life rafts in a sea of evil).

Sometimes we experience our souls’ urgings as a vague uneasiness. Sometimes we react with a full-blown depression. Our deeper awareness of who we are is trying to break through the indoctrination and our emotional bonds with abusers, and it can be a rocky road. After decades of coping with the system, we don’t remember the trauma bonding, and so we feel that something deep in us isn’t fighting for us but against us. Our inner turmoil threatens to overthrow our carefully arranged life. We need to be the kind of person who can do the system dance, but we also can’t deny that a part of us hates playing the game just to pay the bills and finds in the neatly arranged life little place for being who we are. What is this internal conflict? Is it legitimate—but how can it be? Are we nuts? Shouldn’t we just go to a psychiatrist for some drugs to silence the inner mutiny?

Other times, we’re more feisty. We begin to question the system—usually as a reaction to some specific event (did the teacher have to beat that friend of mine? do these people have to be so poor and poorly treated? did we have to bomb that country?). Right away, we get resistance, even when we champion a single and obvious cause. Then we wonder, why can’t people at least see the sanity and justice of this cause? If we go on to question the entire system, a great cry goes up to silence our concerns, and again, we wonder: why do people defend a system that beats them up? Are they crazy?

Because we have to answer such questions in order to act in the world—are we crazy, or are they crazy?—we return to Sandra Bloom’s impossible choices. We either tear ourselves apart with inner conflict (our souls fighting against our trauma bonds), or we tear our societies apart with outer conflict (polarized enemy-think: us against them). These are impossible choices.

What’s the alternative? To see what’s going on behind the impossible choices. The whole idea of impossible choices is part of the control mechanism, which, once identified, no longer has such a hold on us. It’s an emperor without clothes, since other options exist.

To find those options, we need to understand what happens in abusive societies—how they weave their webs of control, so that creative, intelligent people don’t notice what’s going on, or if they do, they still don’t rock the boat. We need to see when a society is being social and when it’s being a domineering jerk. We need to reverse indoctrination-methods by waking up. We need to reverse trauma bonding by engaging in real intimacy. For all this to happen, of course, we need to both open our minds and heal our emotional wounds. Then like concentration-camp survivors (as in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning), we need to walk away from the imposed impossible choices and make some real choices about how to live our lives individually and together.

In short, the alternative is to do what the best philosophical and spiritual teachings have always recommended: to go on the journey of self-awareness, healing, self-examination, and self-transformation. As more of us embark on the inner quest, our inner shifts precipitate shifts in our outer worlds too. If we change—if we wake up to what’s going on, commit to living from our souls, and demand that social structures support us in pursuing what’s most important in life—then the world can’t stay the same.

Why else would social structures work so hard to stereotype us and keep us in our place? They need our consent to stay as is. The moment we claim ourselves from the inside out and look at our social structures without the glasses of trauma bonds, it’s a whole new ball game. Options that leave impossible choices in the dust fall from the trees. We don’t have to choose the most painful and abusive of all possible worlds. We can choose differently.