In his groundbreaking book, On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman tells us:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R), the bible of psychology, states that in post-traumatic stress disorders “the disorder is apparently more severe and longer lasting when the stressor is of human design.” We want desperately to be liked, loved, and in control of our lives; and intentional, overt, human hostility and aggression—more than anything else in life—assaults our self-image, our sense of control, our sense of the world as a meaningful and comprehensible place, and ultimately, our mental and physical health.
The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. Death and debilitation by disease or accident are statistically far more likely to occur than death and debilitation by malicious action, but the statistics do not calm our basically irrational fears. It is not fear of death and injury from disease or accident but rather acts of personal depredation and domination by our fellow human beings that strike terror and loathing in our hearts.
In rape the psychological harm usually far exceeds the physical injury … far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.4
In fact, we are so vulnerable to human-induced trauma that a person does not even have to physically touch us to traumatize us. A person can harm our long-term psychological health by betraying us, humiliating us, calling us a racial slur, spitting in our face, verbally abusing us, spreading malicious rumors about us, and even shunning us. Many people would prefer to break their leg in an accident rather than be publically humiliated or betrayed by those closest to them. People crave nurturing relationships,* and abusive relationships are a significant source of trauma.
In 2013 I attended a nonviolence workshop with participants from many countries. To help us understand the differences and similarities between our various cultures, the workshop organizers had us break into small groups and discuss how our culture responds to the death of a loved one. All of the participants in my group said that when a relative dies, the person’s life is remembered and celebrated with compassion.
I interjected, “But doesn’t it depend on the cause of the person’s death? If a grandmother dies of old age, the funeral might be a celebration of the person’s life, but what if a family member is kidnapped, tortured, and murdered? Doesn’t that tend to be more difficult to celebrate and far more traumatic for the family? What if a loved one is killed in a terrorist attack? Some people may react to the death not with compassion, but with a desire for revenge.”
This changed the nature of the discussion. We began to talk about how most people—regardless of their race, religion, or nationality—would be devastated if a loved one was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. This helped us see our shared humanity, and how the violent death of a family member can traumatize people regardless of whether they are American, Vietnamese, Japanese, British, Russian, Iraqi, or Iranian.
War propaganda often tells us that people in other countries don’t love their children or value human life.* General Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. military forces in Vietnam, said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner … Life is cheap in the Orient. As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.”5 To see this propaganda refuted, a useful place to start is the film Hearts and Minds, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1974. By understanding trauma and our shared humanity, we can all work to refute the illusions of war propaganda.
Trauma will be more severe if we see any human being as the cause of the traumatic event, even if the human being is ourselves. If a family member dies in an accident and we blame ourselves for the accident, the trauma will be more severe because forgiving ourselves can be as difficult as forgiving another person. When we blame ourselves for a tragedy or feel like we should have suffered instead of the victims, this is known as survivor’s guilt.
People can experience survivor’s guilt when someone is hurt or killed by a natural disaster, illness, accident, animal attack, or human attack. When any tragedy occurs, survivor’s guilt can be very difficult to overcome. Many soldiers who survive a war blame themselves for the deaths of their comrades, and survivor’s guilt can be so painful that many people wish they could die and take the place of their deceased loved one.
2. Intimacy
The article’s second misconception is not taking into account how intimate the violence is. In his book On Killing, Grossman says most of the people who survived the London bombings in World War II have less psychological trauma (because the violence was less personal and intimate) than those who were beaten and tortured in Nazi concentration camps:
Those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis. Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps … [Journalist and historian Gwynne] Dyer tells us that concentration camps were staffed, whenever possible, with “both male and female thugs and sadists.” Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.
During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them … But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.6
The article I quoted earlier seems to underestimate the harm caused by trauma, because it does not take into account more intimate forms of trauma such as being beaten, raped, and tortured. The article says, “A recent study of war veterans, for instance, not only demonstrated that roughly 7 percent of soldiers who were deployed developed PTSD, but that 83 percent showed exemplary mental health in the face of potentially traumatic combat situations.”
However, the article does not mention that most veterans of modern war have never been in combat, and that the violence soldiers experience in war can vary widely. As I explain later in this book, if a group of soldiers were forced to commit extremely intimate violence, such as massacring children they know at close range, the rate of trauma among the soldiers would be much higher than 7 percent.
3. Age
The article’s third misconception is not taking into account the age of the person experiencing the trauma. An adult’s brain is more resilient to trauma than a child’s brain, especially if the adult had a healthy and loving childhood. Psychiatrist Bruce Perry describes a common misconception about childhood trauma that was widespread when he began working with abused children in the 1980s, and how this misconception persists today:
Unfortunately, the prevailing view of children and trauma at the time—one that persists to a large degree to this day—is that “children are resilient.” … If anything, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults … The developing brain is most malleable and most sensitive to experience—both good and bad—early in life. (This is why we so easily and rapidly learn language, social nuance,