Traumatized Seekers of Truth

There are two types of human beings: traumatized human beings who manifest various forms of anti-social personality characteristics; and then there are people who have grown up with the good fortune of avoiding trauma, and who appear to experience reality a great deal differently from the traumatized human.

Carl Jung will be my case-study of how the traumatized mind appears biased to think in terms of pre-existant ideas and norms culled from western esotericism, without recognizing the completely unscientific nature of assuming a-priori a truthfulness to the claims of western mystics. I choose Jung because much more than Freud, he sought an ultimate form of meaning which Freud's psychoanalysis strove to edit out. Nevertheless, Jung was unsystematic in his thinking and so didn't seem to see the problem in assuming a qualitative nature or archetype as pre-existing an expressed form, and more or less failed in emphasizing the role of shame and trauma in psychodynamics.

It's interesting to note that Jung back-peddled towards a more Hebrew position later in his life, in deciding to criticize the youthful zestfulness that provoked him to make unjustified and overdetermined assertions about reality. Jung once said in a letter to Freud:

"I think we must give it time to infiltrate among people from many cultures...ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine...for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were - a drunken feast where man regained the ethos and holiness of the animal."

Jung later looked upon his belief in the holiness of the animal - as man the "everything animal" (or an animal that dissociatively imagines it can be any animal other than its own species) as embarrassing:

“Best thanks for the quotation from that accursed correspondence. For me it is an unfortunately inexpungable reminder of the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth. The journey from cloud-cuckoo-land back to reality lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrims Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of Earth that I am.” – Jung, C.G, Letters, Volume 1: 1906-1950, Gerard Adler (ed.) R.F.C.Hull (trans).Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, taken from: Ladson Hinton, Hessel Willemsen, Temporality and Shame: Perspective from Psychoanalysis and Philosophy; pg. 7, Routledge, 2017

There's a concept here which Jung is attempting to communicate, but it wasn't yet a part of the theoretical pychodynamic lexicon: idealization.

"The Secret" is the best example of an indiscriminate fatuousness that assumes one can wish in any which way, as if reality didn't have laws and rules which generate consequences which affect how we experience life and reality. The secret, or the idea that "reality can be your own personal genie", without any mention of symmetry or brain dynamics or how mental states are effects of motivational systems for self-regeneration interacting with external meaning-streams, is akin to the difference between a linear and a non-linear explanation of a phenomena. A whirlpool is the effect of the riverbed, water flow, and the presence of rocks, so that when all these conditions converge, a non-linear emergent phenomena is created: the whirlpool.

Similarly, the actions and meanings we enact in the world have consequences for the brain-dynamics of the right hemisphere, which is structured to match-correlate ones intentional state against others in the environment. This "meta-function" is itself iinterwoven into the fabric of brain processing, as communication is essentially prediction-of-the-signal, implying that each organism interincludes within its functioning the semiotic 'self-states' of the others they interact with in their biological and semiotic - or biosemiotic - development.

What the Buddhist tradition gets right, and which also seems to be present in early forms of Christianity, is that the Human is a fundamentally compassionate being, so much so that the Logos or reason is essentially the same thing as love or agape, that the feeling is the intution of the unity of the whole, whereas reason itself is an attempt to trace ones way back to wholeness.

In anycase, what is the fate for the traumatized seeker of truth?

Numbers 20:12: But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them."

Is the above verse perhaps a reference to the traumatized seeker of truth? This response of God apparently comes after Moses strikes the rock to give the clamoring Israelites something to drink for themselves and their livestock. The water is "life", or enlivenment; the livestocks of the common mass - the lay people, is the cultural 'stuff' that encodes the various conditions of our being. So long as a person in the community has unresolved traumas, the "moses" - or traumatized enlightened seekers of truth - cannot enter the holy land, or experience the peace and bliss of being-in-the-world, precisely because they are so sensitive to the meanings of the cues coming from other bodies, they are easily put into a negative state.



In the above diagram, the Jungian, or fallacy of the taumatized-mind, is assuming a priori substance to reality which the mind, it assumes, is merely putting itself back into correlation with (Jung apparently thought the 'raw passsions' were smart in his youth). But in fact, creatures shape themselves, and in the case of the human being, our existence in this world is a function of a point-counterpoint dynamic occuring within the embodied observing perspective from which we always originate in our knowing, and the mental or actual object in the world with which we interact. The background - the feeling state - is a function of early life biological processes which formed the metaphorical basis for our later life reasoning processes. Since brain development has clear-cut 'critical phases', a traumatic early life will essentially inscribe within the brain a dysregulated psyche-soma, or "body-consciousness", so that you either feel little affect, or negative affect, and thus search for solutions to your problems in ways that are often antisocial, given how complex a mind one needs to navigate the intriacies of human interaction.

The values we incarnate is the counterpoint of our being. The observing perspective from which we look upon the world passes through a body with a semiotic history; and this history, in having come before what is currently experienced, is tantamount to a downstream effect in a river which can be attributed to something which happened upstream, as in countries which share rivers and need to share the water.

My point is - do not stare into the light lest you blind yourself. The negative response we take upon teh world is the residual impact of a social-world full of people who do not understand themselves, others, or the reasons they act. So what we see is anxiety; and anxiety, being such a depressive and depleting emotional state, can easily foster feelings of world-hatred. But the feeling and the belief - or "i hate the world", are different entities. Symbolically speaking, the human asserter constitutes the cruelty that comes with asserting with zest "there is no truth".

a reply to: Astrocyte

I sent you a PM the other day.

a reply to: Astrocyte

two types of human beings: traumatized human beings who manifest various forms of anti-social personality characteristics; and then there are people who have grown up with the good fortune of avoiding trauma, and who appear to experience reality a great deal differently from the traumatized human.

But in your other essays you state that every being is born into trauma. How can you now state that "some have grown up avoiding trauma?"


www.dallasnews.com...

In the fall of 2015, Rachel Yehuda and her team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York published results of a study looking at the genes of 32 Jewish women and men. All were Holocaust survivors who either had been interned in Nazi concentration camps, forced into hiding during World War II or seen or experience torture. The team also studied the genes of 22 children who were born to Holocaust survivors after the war.

Previous studies had found that children of Holocaust survivors have a higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, especially if the parents themselves have PTSD. In a 2015 paper in the journal Biological Psychiatry, Yehuda wrote she had found a genetic explanation for this apparent inheritance of trauma.

Her team found changes in the DNA of Holocaust survivors, changes which the scientists said were passed on to offspring. “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” Yehuda said.

What Yehuda described has come to be known as epigenetic inheritance. It’s the idea that traumatic experiences affect DNA in ways that are passed on to children and grandchildren, kind of like molecular scars. The idea has taken off, and New Age guru Deepak Chopra is among those who support the finding.

But Yehuda’s study is deeply flawed.

What is epigenetics?

If DNA contains instructions for making eyes brown and hair curly, epigenetics refers to ways in which those genes are turned on and off. Genes are the blueprint for creating proteins, while epigenetics is the study of how genes are read.

At least that’s the original definition of epigenetics. Nowadays, the term is also used to describe gene modifications that are passed on from parents to children. Some scientists say we transmit more than our genes. We also pass on molecular switches and information about how those genes should be expressed.

One of the most studied epigenetic modifications is DNA methylation, in which small molecules are added to genes, changing the activity of DNA. In a study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 2014, Yehuda found that male Holocaust survivors who suffered PTSD had children with higher methylation of a gene involved in stress response.

But these changes are exceedingly difficult to interpret. Yehuda's team found that if both of the child’s parents were Holocaust survivors with PTSD, the child was more likely to have lower methylation of that gene.

Flawed study

The problems with Yehuda’s 2015 study — which is still generating headlines stating that trauma is inherited — begin with the small study size. Only 32 survivors and 22 of their offspring were studied. That’s a very small group on which to base this theory and a major study flaw that many media outlets overlooked.

While the team studied the children of women who lived through the Holocaust, they would have to study the great-grandchildren of survivors to prove actual epigenetic inheritance from mother to offspring. Why must four generations be studied? Baby girls are born with their lifetime supply of eggs. The eggs that made you were present inside your mother when she was a fetus inside your grandmother. Because a pregnant woman already possesses the DNA of her grandchildren and these genes can be affected by things during her pregnancy, the DNA of the great-grandchildren has to be studied to show that epigenetic changes were passed on across generations.

Another flaw is that researchers looked at only a tiny number of genes. Further, the study didn’t account for the influence of social factors. Children born to Holocaust survivors may grow up listening to accounts of the war's horrors. Josie Glausiusz, a participant in Yehuda's 2014 study, raised this point in a recent essay in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Glausiusz’s father survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She wrote, “I was troubled by a question: How does one separate the impact of horrific stories heard in childhood from the influence of epigenetics?”

She’s not the only one to raise this question. Researchers have also cast doubt on the study's conclusions based on the small changes in DNA methylation that were seen. There's also the issue of reverse causation: If DNA methylation is significant, is that change caused by trauma or does the methylation itself increase the risk of PTSD?

The week after the study was published, the blog of the Center for Epigenomics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York called it the “over-interpreted epigenetics study of the week.”

John Greally, professor of genetics at the college, wrote: “The story being told by the Holocaust study is indeed fascinating as a scientific possibility, and will no doubt prompt others to pursue similar studies. Unfortunately, the story is typical of many in the field of epigenetics, with conclusions drawn based on uninterpretable studies.”

Those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust and other tragedies find themselves asking if they will pass that trauma on to their children. The headlines say, yes but based on a close look at the research, the answer so far is no.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Although I rarely agree with your conclusions I do very much enjoy reading your threads because you spur interesting discussion, thinking, and research.

Keep it up Astrocyte!

a reply to: TheConstruKctionofLight

Not only do I take the position that trauma is entirely enviornmental (and has no solid hereditary components - because we'd all be terribly traumatized considering how screwed up the last few thousand years of human history are), but I also contend that PTSD doesn't even exist as an actual disease either.

I have saved a handful of links from some top psychiatrists and psychologists that support the claim that "PTSD isn't real" (in terms of our modern clinical concept / construct), and I've been toying with the idea of posting something fleshing out why this is the case and how our modern understanding of trauma is deeply flawed.

Thx for sharing that article btw.

a reply to: muzzleflash

Thank you for your thoughts as well. Over the last 5 years I have come to suspect that PTSD is not a disease as well.
I look forward to reading your thread when you get around to it.

from the article I quote I find this very telling.

Further, the study didn’t account for the influence of social factors. Children born to Holocaust survivors may grow up listening to accounts of the war's horrors. Josie Glausiusz, a participant in Yehuda's 2014 study, raised this point in a recent essay in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Glausiusz’s father survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She wrote, “I was troubled by a question:How does one separate the impact of horrific stories heard in childhood from the influence of epigenetics?”

a reply to: muzzleflash

I find Astrocyte to be a highly caring person but like you sometimes I don't agree with his conclusions.

Its frustrating that he rarely responds to posts in his own threads to further clarify for our benefit.

I wonder if its a time constraint issue as I believe he has his own practice.

a reply to: muzzleflash

How could ptsd be a disease when it's very nature is epigenetic?

a reply to: Astrocyte

Do you know that 12 year olds are now watching violence against women on a regular basis?
Children are going on line and searching for rude words (like we did when we were young - but we just had a dictionary!) - and what they are being subjected to is violent porn - it arouses them and then disgusts them and it is addictive.
What do you suppose (with all your knowledge) will be the outcome?

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

The word disease can be broken down into two words - dis ease. Would you say that someone who has seen and experienced horrific things that they would be at ease (mentally)?

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Well forgive me for my non answer, but I think I have reached the point in my life where I will double down in ignorance and pursue happiness in just the way the movie portrayed it, without neglecting my boy in the process of course.

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed
Sorry - could you elaborate please? What movie?
What post are you replying to?

originally posted by: hopenotfeariswhatweneed
a reply to: muzzleflash

How could ptsd be a disease when it's very nature is epigenetic?

It's not epigenetic at all.

Everyone has to handle trauma in life. The key is developing coping mechanisms and then working through the trauma to overcome it.