Читать книгу The Cosmic Ocean - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 15

The article’s sixth misconception is not taking into account the forms of trauma that rupture our trust in human beings. A traumatic event that damages our ability to trust human beings will increase the severity of our trauma, because we all want to be around people we can trust. Even Adolf Hitler wanted to be around people he could trust. Nobody ever says, “One quality I value in a friend, spouse, boss, coworker, or employee is betrayal. I love being around people I can’t trust.” One of the most painful events we can experience in our fragile human existence is betrayal.

Why can betrayal be so devastating to our psychological well-being? Human beings are social creatures who rely on cooperation to survive, but true cooperation cannot exist without trust. When we lose our ability to trust human beings, we can feel like we are going insane. Paranoia is often associated with insanity, but what does it mean to be paranoid? Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, the author of Achilles in Vietnam, says paranoia can be best understood as “the inability to trust human beings.”10

The ability to trust human beings is crucial to both our psychological health and survival as a species. Zebras don’t trust lions who hunt them, but imagine what would happen if zebras lost the ability to trust other zebras. Bees don’t trust bears who want their honey, but imagine what would happen if bees perceived every other bee in their hive as a threat. What would happen if wolves lost the ability to trust the members of their own pack, and elephants could no longer trust the members of their own herd?

Countless species must deal with their fear of predators, but human beings are the only species that contend with predators in their homes, in the form of family members who are supposed to protect us but instead make us fear for our lives. Nadine Burke Harris, founder and CEO of Center for Youth Wellness, described how this contributes to behavioral problems in school when Ira Glass interviewed her on National Public Radio:

If you look on the molecular level, you’re walking through the forest and you see a bear, right? So you can either fight the bear or run from the bear. That’s kind of your fight or flight system … And that’s really good if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night. Right? And for a lot of these kids, what happens is that this system, this fight or flight response, which is an emergency response in your body, it’s activated over and over and over again. And so that’s what we were seeing in the kids that I was caring for …

[If a teacher asks a student living in a violent household], “Oh, could you please diagram this sentence? Or could you please divide two complex numbers?” You’d be like, what are you talking about? And so that’s what we were seeing in the kids that I was caring for, is that a lot of them had a terrible time paying attention. They have a hard time sitting still … For our kids, if they had four or more adverse childhood experiences, their odds of having learning or behavior problems in school was 32 times as high as kids who had no adverse childhood experiences.11

Ira Glass added:

When the brain does something over and over and over again, it creates pathways that get more and more ingrained. So this kind of repeated stress affects the development of these kids’ brains. And especially affected in this situation is a specific part of the brain that’s called the prefrontal cortex, which is where a lot of these non-cognitive skills happen—self-control and impulse control, certain kinds of memory and reasoning. Skills they call executive functions.

If you’re in a constant state of emergency, that part of your brain just doesn’t develop the same. Doctors can see the differences on brain scans. Dr. Burke Harris says that for these kids, the bear basically never goes away. They still feel its effects even when they’re just trying to sit there quietly in English class … And you hear about this in lots of schools. Head Start teachers in one survey said that over a fourth of their low income students had serious self-control and behavior problems. Nadine Burke Harris says that it’s true for her patients, the ones with adverse childhood experiences like neglect, domestic violence, a parent with mental illness or substance abuse.12

Like many children who grow up in unpredictably violent households, I had serious behavioral problems as a child in school. I had great difficulty paying attention to the teacher, concentrating, and controlling my impulses. I was kicked out of elementary school for behavioral problems, almost kicked out of middle school for similar reasons, and suspended in high school for fighting. I actually love to learn; I just hated school. When a child is miserable and terrified at home, these feelings do not go away just because the child is at school.

In high school I did well on the SAT and had good enough grades to get accepted into West Point, but my behavioral problems as a student did not go away just because I left my parents’ house. At West Point I still had problems concentrating and paying attention to the teacher. My mind was often lost in daydreams while the teacher was talking, and sometimes an entire class period went by without me listening to anything the teacher said. Instead of doing my homework at West Point, I read books on philosophy that had nothing to do with my classes, hoping to find answers to my agony. My grades suffered because of this, but not as much as I suffered.