The Hidden Trauma of the Wars in Europe

The generation of my parents were children during World War II. It's that recent. And it's horrific. The Blitz, in UK, included 58 days of continuous bombing. Fifty eight days. And the nights. Continuous. Likewise, Dresden, in Germany, was almost completely destroyed in the carpet-bombing campaign by the Allies.

And yet.....NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THE TRAUMA. And this happened to people who are still alive today.*

And it's not only the Second World War. My grandfather was gassed and shell-shocked somewhere on the front line in France in the First World War, and was never the same again. But we don't talk about that either. Even though almost every village in the UK has a monument to the men who died, usually with over a dozen names--they put the men of one village into a platoon together, so when the platoon was wiped out, so were all the men of an entire community. Eleven million men died across Europe, and an entire generation of women grew up and died spinsters because of it.

The French, as a nation, talk endlessly about the Holocaust, trying to make sense of what happened, and what they did to contribute. In UK, the War (meaning the second one) is referred to as 'Britain's finest hour'. In Germany, the discourse is one of national shame. But there is no discourse that I know of about the post-traumatic effect of the wars on the general population throughout Europe.
No discourse about the PTSD. Nothing about the effect on our cultural and familial psyche of two hideous wars in 40 years. (It's alluded to when people write about the drive behind the European Union, but that's it.)

Is this because the thing is too big and extensive? Is it shame, that the flower of our culture led to this? Was it swept under the rug in the urgency of reconstruction? Was the Holocaust so hideous that no-one else's trauma seemed valid beside it?

And yet I see it in our familial and personal psyches all the time. When the first Gulf War started, women my age fought physically over storable food in the aisles of French supermarkets, which were emptied every day of flour, sugar, pasta and oil--that was the memory of near famine. When the Falklands war errupted, my mother switched into another personality, and the country was swept away by jingoism--that was the memory of the patriotism that kept them going through the war. When I hear sirens, my entire body floods with terror--that's the family memory of the Blitz, in which my father and his family were buried in rubble when a church collapsed on them in Coventry.

John Cleese made great hay out of "don't mention the war". But it's about time we began to mention the war.

It's why Angela Merkel, who keeps bailing out Europe, is loathed in the very countries she has saved, and pictured with a swastika. It's why Israel is caught in a terrible re-enactment of unfathomable trauma with the Palestinians. It's why I save jars, string, paper bags and left-overs--because my grannies, who lived through both wars, never threw a thing away. It's why when my dear German friend Bettina, her mother, and I talked about the war at her mother's house in Berlin last year, the air seemed to thicken around us.

There's a positive side to it too. As Tony Judt points out in his book 'Postwar', Europeans do not share the unlimited US optimism and belief in progress, because we know what collective shadow looks like. We don't trust our governments. We are less keen to go to war. The Germans have a an unparalleled anti-nuclear movement, I believe, because they have recently experienced utter devastation. The French have a law against 'non-assistance of persons in danger', and don't allow 'my boss told me to do it' as a defense under the law, because of the camps. When their government does something they don't like, they strike and take to the streets. Those Greek riots we keep seeing--that's Europeans, remembering the war.

*Since I wrote this blog post, I've become aware of an excellent book called 'Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II', by Keith Lowe. If you're interested in the effects of the war on the general population of Europe, this book is a great place to start.

Cultural Casebook: How To Hear the Voice of God

T M Luhrman is a psychological anthropologist, which means she likes to investigate our lives from the inside, and see how we create our worlds through the workings of our minds. In this book, she reports on the process by which evangelical Christians learn to hear the voice of God.

Luhrman is agnostic about whether or not these people are 'really' tuning into the voice of the Almighty. She makes no pronouncements about whether or not she believes in God herself. And this neutrality makes the book possible. It's not a polemic; it's an impartial investigation. In order to research the book she joined a congregation, attended church, went to bible study meetings and other classes, learned to pray and interviewed the church members about their own experience. The result is fascinating. I couldn't put it down.

What Luhrman found is that evangelicals learn to tune in to the different qualities of thoughts within their own mind, in order to distinguish the impulses of ego from the 'other' messages that come to them, potentially from God. (They qualify the 'other' voices carefully, to ensure that they really are divine, using criteria such as whether the message is asking you to hurt yourself or someone else, in which case, it is classified as not the voice of God.) As a Jungian, I would identify these 'other' messages as coming from non-ego parts of the psyche. Instead of messages from God, I would call them messages from the Self--that part of the psyche which participates in the universal ground of being, and which one might call the soul. For Jungians, a dialogue between the ego and the Self is essential to health and individuation, or evolution.

Luhrman also distinguishes several types of prayer, and reports that evangelicals train their minds to enter into the stories of the bible, visualising the scenes in sensory detail, in ways that are similar to the visualisation prayers used by Tibetan Buddhists. This training results in sharper mental imagery, more intense emotional experience of God, and better ability to hear 'his' voice.

A key element of the evangelical experience is the gradually acquired certainty that God loves you exactly the way you are. God becomes a self-object, in psychological terminology, which has an enormous healing potential. And in a stunning paradox, not having prayers answered seems to increase the faith of an evangelical Christian, who learns to lean into God for comfort and love.

This book is fascinating in itself, a 'must' if you're interested in the psychology of religion, and a great source of insight if you work or live with Christians. As a non-Christian, I found myself drawn to trying some of this, as indeed did Luhrman. Anyone in Jungian analysis learns to heed the voice of the Self, so the idea made sense to me. In Jungian therapy we use art and active imagination to engage in dialogue with the Self, and we attend to the synchroncities that happen in life, and which seem to provide us with guidance. It's not so far removed from the phenomena Luhrman describes, and I found the book creating an unexpected bridge for me to the world of evangelical Christianity.

Amaeru: A Japanese Term For The Desire and Need To Be Cared For

The Japanese concept of amaeru became known in the West via the work of Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi.

According to Doi, amaeru refers to the behaviour of attempting to get someone to take care of you--usually a parent, teacher, spouse or boss. Doi defines amaeru, as meaning "to depend and presume upon another's benevolence." It indicates "helplessness and the desire to be loved", and denotes 'dependency needs'.

Amae (the noun form of amaeru) describes behaviour which constitutes an implicit request for indulgence of one's perceived needs--it may include coyness, capriciousness and childishness. It is based on the prototype of a child's behaviour with its parents.

A Japanese website retells a story from Doi, about amae and how the lack of amae in America shocked him: "His friend put some cookies ... on a table and said "If you are hungry, please help yourself." Coming from the culture of amae, Doi felt put out. He was hungry, but he was in an amae frame of mind. He did not want to say, "Well I don't mind if I do," and tuck into the cookies. He wanted his host to actively perceive ("sasshi") that he was hungry and give him a plate of cookies. He wanted to be mollycoddled. The word "mollycoddle," not so common in English, helps us to understand the term amae. Some one who wants to be mollycoddled does not articulate their desire but hopes by their person or their actions to elicit indulgence from an other without the use of language. As soon as they put their desire into language they are putting themselves on an equal footing, as another separate desiring individual - but the person who "amaes" (if I am allowed to conjugate the verb) wants to merge (Doi argues) with the other."

According to the Wikipedia article on Doi, the range of behaviours described by amae includes that of "a husband who comes home drunk and depends on his wife to get him ready for bed. Amae has a connotation of immaturity, but it is also recognized as a key ingredient in loving relationships, perhaps more so than the notions of romance so common in the West."

Some more examples of amae are listed here, in a blog by a Spanish person living in Japan. S/he also notes: "Amae plays a fundamental role in a collectivist society where individualism is not well seen and people likes the group to have the power. Amae helps in the process of creating harmonious interconnections inside the family, in the companies and between friends. Japanese do not usually confront each other. It is very difficult to see Japanese people arguing. Amae is one of the tools to keep the harmony, the peace, the wa 和 in the Japanese society. [sic]"

The concept of amae was taken up by US psychologists Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Faith Bethelard, who translate it as 'cherishment' in their book 'Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart'. Young-Bruehl and Bethelard use the concept of amae to argue for a more loving form of psychotherapy, proposing that the desire of clients to be cherished is profound, and often goes unmet in therapy. They suggest that pathologies arise when this so human need is not satisfied.

It seems to me that latter concept is important to consider--especially in this culture, where dependency needs are pathologised, and there is little, if any, acceptance of our lifelong human need to be cherished, taken care of, and understood without having to explain.

Two Spirit People: Gender and Transgender in Native American Tradition

In Native American cultures, people that we would usually call gay or transgender are known as 'two-spirit people': people who embody both male and female spirits. Sometimes these two-spirit people are known in anthropological literature as 'berdache'.

This video beautifully presents the two-spirit tradition. It emphasizes that the two-spirit role is a spiritual one, which makes it different from gay or lesbian identity, which is based on the physical and social.

"Traditionally, the Two-spirited person was one who had received a gift from the Creator, that gift being the privilege to house both male and female spirits in their bodies. " Having both male and female within gives two-spirit people the ability to transcend boundaries, including the boundary between the earth and the spirit world. Thus they can provide a conduit to the spirit world. For this reason, two-spirit people were traditionally respected, and held powerful and important roles as teachers and healers.

Native American writers Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn say, "Many tribes had rituals for children to go through if they were recognized as acting different from their birth gender. These rituals ensured the child was truly two-spirit. If parents noticed that a son was disinterested in boyish play or manly work, they would set up a ceremony to determine which way the boy would be brought up. They would make an enclosure of brush, and place in the center both a man's bow and a woman's basket. The boy was told to go inside the circle of brush and to bring something out, and as he entered the brush would be set on fire. The tribe watched what he took with him as he ran out, and if it was the basketry materials they reconciled themselves to his being a 'berdache'."

Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn have posted a detailed article on two-spirit people written from a positive gay identity. They point out the controversy between traditionalists and two-spirit people, in the post-colonial context of today's America, and urge us all to learn from this heritage, which can enrich all of us.

Stages of Acculturation

Acculturation is the process of adapting to living in a new culture. It's something all immigrants go through, and though most writers on the subject seem to think the stages last for weeks or months, I know from experience that it can take place over years. It has taken me ten years to proceed through them, and in the disorienting wilderness of the middle stages, it would have been helpful to have had a description of the process, as a map to guide me toward home.

Stage 1: Euphoria
In this stage, a person is full of excitement at their new surroundings. I remember sitting happily under the grapefruit tree in my tiny backyard during my first long California summer, smelling the jasmine and orange blossom, and living off corn tortillas and avocados. I loved racoons, NPR, all the ethnic food I could get so easily in California, and the natural beauty of the area. This stage lasted several years for me.

Stage 2: Culture Shock and Alienation
In this stage, a person becomes keenly aware of the cultural differences between him/her and the host culture. They feel the loss of aspects of home. Feelings range from irritability to panic. A person can feel deeply lonely and sad, homesick and confused, or angry and hostile at people who do not understand them, and customs that seem wrong. Immigrants in this stage seek out compatriots, and often complain about the local people, culture and customs.
I was filled with a feeling of homesickness in this stage, longing for Europe, seeking out French food, movies and books, and feeling lost in the US. I felt confused about where I ought to be, and found myself often despising the way things were done in America, while trying to hide my prejudices and judgements from my close US friends. It would have been very helpful to me at this stage to have known that it was a phase in a gradual process of settling in, rather than a sign that I had made a big mistake in relocating to the US.

Stage 3: Anomie, or Culture Stress
In this stage, a person gradually restabilises. Some of the stresses of culture shock are solved, and some continue. A person in this stage may experience an identity crisis, feeling at home neither in their home culture, nor in their new culture. In this stage, I used to joke ruefully that I was stuck in the middle of the Atlantic. I knew that there were many things about California that I loved and appreciated, but I still felt confused about my feelings of homesickness for Europe.

Stage 4: Assimilation or Adaptation
In this final stage, a person either assimilates or acculturates.
Acculturation permits a person to find value and meaning in both cultures and identify with both. An acculturated person accepts the new culture, and feels able to negotiate it and live within it, without compromising who they are. They are able to feel similarity with the people of the host culture, as well as identity with their own culture and language.
Assimilation means that a person's old cultural values and beliefs are replaced by the new culture. They leave behind the culture of their parents, for example, and take on "American ways".
As I acculturated to California, I began to take walks around the little Northern California town I live in, smiling at its beauty. I relished soy chai and Thai food, and local farmer's markets. I loved the vast computer-linked library system, the local geeks, quaint wooden cottages, and bay trees. I felt fully myself, with all of my European-ness, living in California, and I began to deepen my relationships with American friends. I decided to apply for citizenship.

All immigrants negotiate these stages differently. Our reasons for coming here make a difference to our acculturation process. For example, did we choose to come, or were we forced to leave our home as refugees, or political exiles? How much trauma and loss were involved? What and whom did we leave behind? What were we able to bring, and what were we able to recreate once we got here? Can we exercise our profession, or did we lose our socio-economic status and earning power when we took up residence here? Is our kind accepted here? Is our being here a matter of struggling to survive, or does it represent an opportunity to thrive?

Trauma Work In Congo Using Local Metaphors

Here's a nice blog post from 'Beyond Trauma', the Somatic Experiencing blog. It describes a group intervention using local metaphors to educate people in Congo about the effects of trauma. Instead of the usual metaphor of "it's like having the brake and the accelerator on at the same time", the trainer uses a locally applicable metaphor of being chased by a wild animal. The audience responds from their experience.

Somatic Experiencing is a trauma therapy methodology developed by Peter Levine. Its basic premise is that PTSD happens as a result of the body's normal fight/flight reactions getting blocked. For example, after a scary event, the body naturally trembles. If we stifle the trembling, then the adrenalin 'locks in', and the fear stays in the body. It's better to allow the body's natural processes of trembling, tears, and so on to move through, bringing calm in their wake. Levine's practitioners focus on retraining the body, and safe release of previously stored trauma.

The Anthropology of Money

Students at the University of California at Irvine have created an online exhibition on the anthropology of money, drawing on information from relatives and friends in immigrant communities in Southern California. The home page says:

"This project took the student researchers to Little Saigon, Little India, the Cambodian Corridor of Long Beach, Los Angeles's Chinatown, Little Armenia, the clubs of Hollywood, the dorms of UC Irvine and the barrios of East LA. It also involved phone calls to far-away relatives and friends, and travels through memories contained in family photo-albums, scrapbooks, and sacred texts."

The exhibition discusses:

• various types and uses of lucky money in Hawaiian, Chinese and Muslim culture
• tandas and cundinas: Mexican-American and Latino-American rotating credit associations
• Lakshmi and ritual uses of money in Hindu culture
• the mid-Lent festival in Armenian culture
• ghost money in Chinese culture
• 'edible money' in the form of dumplings in Chinese culture.