We live in a traumatized world
Generations of unhealed trauma yield traumatizing societies grounded in a traumatized world view.
“In my view, this is a society that traumatizes people by its very nature. And to recognize the impact of trauma is to question the very essence of this particular culture.” — Gabor Maté
Our traumatized and traumatizing culture of hyperproductivity and rigid individualism:
- conflates the value of our doings with the value of our being
- treats us exclusively as individual mono-minds.
- prioritizes competition over community, denying our interdependence
To live in a society which requires a human being who never asked to be born to somehow earn their right to live is on its own traumatic. It creates a baseline level of dissociation — a feeling of separateness from our emotions, from our bodies, from other people, from life, from the Earth. We are all so chronically stressed that the western world considers Mindfulness Meditation relaxing despite the fact that it is effortful.
The sensory overload of information and provoking news stories bombards us constantly until our (Parts) are forced to pull us inward and numb us against them. They work tirelessly to keep us safe, but a suit of armor isolates as much as it protects. When we tune out our inner and outer experience, we by extension tune out other people. This makes authentic connection almost impossible, while forgetting (or never realizing) who we are beneath the armor is almost inevitable.
With air and noise pollution, the constant bombardment of digital and real-world advertising in concrete jungles of identical homes arranged with tight efficiency and insulated from the rest of the world, it’s easy to forget that we even share the Earth with other species, never mind that they outnumber us.
The Integral Guide to Well-Being: Traumatized World, 2024
Under the present brutal and primitive conditions of the planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
Robert Anton Wilson
A legacy burden is a complex of extreme emotions, beliefs, and energies that has been passed down from our ancestors. Pretty much every other culture on this planet, from hunter-gatherers to urban civilizations, recognizes the importance of ancestors. They are worshiped or placated, honored and feared.
We do inherit things that our parents experienced that are not transmitted to us through genes. When I was in high school and college, we were taught that this idea was ridiculous.
The most important experiment about multigenerational transmission was conducted by Brian Dias at Emory and Kerry Ressler at Harvard (Dias and Ressler 2013). Dias had noticed that in his community — the poor Hispanic community in Atlanta, Georgia — addiction and mental illness seemed to run in families. He wondered if there was any way this could be biologically inherited, so he designed a very clever experiment to test it. He took a male rat and exposed it to a chemical that has a relatively pleasant smell, somewhat like cherries or almonds. He paired that smell with electric shocks until the rat had a startle response when it was just exposed to the smell. This created a classically conditioned reflex. Then he took the semen from that rat and artificially inseminated a female rat. The female rat never met the male rat and was never exposed to the smell. When she had her pups and they were mature enough, they were exposed to the same smell, and they had the same startle response!
So this acquired characteristic was heritable, and there was absolutely no behavioral connection between the original male rat and these children. This startle response continued for generations. There are many other experiments like this now. We know it happens. So psychologically, traumas that happened to your ancestors can affect you.
Falconer, The Others Within Us