PTSD: What It Really Is

 

The experts currently trace all depression back to PTSD, and PTSD usually developed from abuse in childhood. Not just depression, either, but also chronic anxiety, obesity, high blood pressure, allergies, and so forth.

The concept of PTSD comes from war—it used to be called “Shell shock.” And because of this, it has been falsely associated with fear of getting hurt. Soldiers suffering PTSD used to be suspected of cowardice.

But PTSD is not caused by fear, or physical abuse, or for that matter sexual abuse.

When Tim Ballard, whose story is told in the new film “The Sound of Freedom,” began the work of rescuing trafficked children, he suffered PTSD. When three helicopter crewmen tried to save some of the civilians being massacred at My Lai, they suffered severe PTSD. None of these people were in significant danger of being harmed themselves. Nor is PTSD a reaction to guilt over anything they had done; none of the soldiers who actually massacred civilians at My Lai are reported to have developed PTSD.

PTSD is a healthy moral reaction to an encounter with evil.

Evil is so disturbing that most of us deny it even exists; we whistle past the graveyard. If we encounter someone genuinely evil, we tend to idolize rather than condemn them—the Stockholm syndrome. Their perspective must be right, and we must somehow have it wrong. They must then be beings with superior knowledge. I remember in China seeing an older woman bowing and praying to a picture of Chairman Mao in a Buddhist temple. She must have lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution herself. And in fiction, there is the clownish Russian neighbour who extolls to Marlow the exceptional wisdom of his neighbour Kurtz; he knows Kurtz is massacring the native people.

This is a reason psychopaths and narcissists often rise to the top in society. Knowing no moral restraint looks like leadership.

War is of course intrinsically evil. It is intrinsically evil to try to kill other humans, who as far as you can know have done no wrong; yet that is what war requires. A decent, moral human is liable to be deeply traumatized. (This is not to say that it is evil to go to war, or to be a soldier; fighting a war is often the best way to prevent war. But war is at best a necessary evil.)

So too of one’s experience in a family, as a child. If a parent is immoral, a morally sensitive child will be deeply traumatized, apart from any physical or sexual abuse. This moral abuse is more permanently damaging than either of those other two forms of abuse. Although, in the natural course of things, the parent who abuses morally will probably also abuse physically and sexually; if they are not smart. If they are not smart: someone who abuses their child physically or sexually is likely to be found out; an intelligent narcissist will not commonly risk it.

They can enjoy destroying their morally sensitive child mentally instead.