Trauma: how we lie to ourselves, what it does to us - and how we can get out of it

It is possible to get out of battle shock or at least alleviate its symptoms, if the commanders in the field take care of this in the immediate term

In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied huge territories. Four Einsatzgruppen units operated in these territories - forming an SS operation - whose role was to murder Jews and communists. In less than six months, about half a million Jews were murdered, including the elderly, women and babies. Gradually, the commanders of these units discovered a disturbing phenomenon: the SS men who committed the murders suffered from trauma - and reacted accordingly. Some became violent towards their colleagues and commanders; Some of them became addicted to a drop of bitterness, and their operational ability suffered a steep decline. There were members of various extermination units who even tried to evade the murders. The SS had to find other ways of mass murder. At the end of 1941, less than six months after the beginning of the mass murders, the first murder facility using gas began operating in the occupied territories. One of the considerations that motivated the Nazis to switch from murdering Jews by shooting to murder in gas chambers was the desire to spare the SS members who were murdering the trauma of direct contact with the victims.

A similar trauma was diagnosed among American soldiers in Vietnam. They released the tension and pressure they were under by acting against their commanders. The custom of killing their commanders by rolling hand grenades into their tents spread among them, a phenomenon that received the name "fragging", short for "fragmentation grenade".

What can be learned from this? Everyone who is exposed to a violent act is affected by the violent situation, even if he is not the victim but the perpetrator, and even if he committed the violent act out of choice and not under coercion. Although the soldiers in Vietnam were conscripted, the SS men were volunteers. They were ready for anything, including killing women and children. They just did not anticipate the intensity of the mental damage that completing the mission would cause them - neither they nor their commanders.

With the transition to a less direct method of murder, in which the killer was not forced to see his victim, the number of SS men who had difficulty murdering or refused to participate in murders dropped drastically. The phenomena of mental distress that were discovered among the SS officers who shot Jews were almost never discovered among the SS officers in the extermination camps. The latter were not tasked with shooting the victims serially, but only at individual victims, and that too in exceptional cases; And they hardly saw their victims before or after the murder, since it was the Jewish Sonderkommandos who were forced to lead the victims to the gas chambers, remove the bodies and transfer them to the crematoria. This is how the SS command solved the problem of the mental distress of its soldiers. The degree of physical proximity to the victim influenced both the willingness to murder and the intensity of the mental harm experienced by the killer.

In Stanley Milgram's well-known experiment, the subjects believed that they were being ordered to give electric shocks to people in order to test the ability of the beaten to learn under the threat of punishment. The torturers were willing to give electric shocks to a person whom they saw and talked to a few minutes before the start of the experiment, and this willingness increased significantly the farther they were from the victim. When the facilitator gave the torturers instructions over the phone, their degree of compliance was low, but when the facilitator was in the room, their degree of compliance increased significantly; When the torturers were required to pin the hand of the interrogated with their own hands to the metal plate from which he was supposed to receive an electric shock, their willingness to obey decreased significantly. When the interrogated person was already connected to the board and they were tasked "only" to give him electric shocks, their restraints were significantly reduced. When the interrogated was in another room, out of sight and only his screams of pain were heard, the degree of compliance increased and so did the intensity of the electric shocks. It was enough to physically remove the victim to remove any resistance to the willingness to hit him with electric shocks, at the experimenter's command. For those who were happy and asked to stop the experiment, the chief researcher would say: "It is essential that you continue in order to complete the experiment. The responsibility is all on me."

It was just an experiment. The torturers thought they were giving electric shocks, but the screams of pain they heard were recorded. The purpose of the experiment was to test whether a person would obey the command to cause pain. This experiment was conducted in 1961, inspired by the evidence about the mass murders carried out by the SS men, evidence that came up in the Eichmann trial. Some of the experiment participants developed trauma symptoms due to the pressure they were under. It seems that no ethics committee would approve the existence of such an experiment today.

Recently, Joshua Greene (Greene) from Princeton presented his research participants with a dilemma: an electric train car is about to hit five people and kill them. If you lift any lever, the carriage will tip over and only one person will be killed. will you do it After that, Green put the subjects in the same situation, but this time, instead of lifting a handle, the subjects were required to push a person into the path of the tram car. The person who is pushed will be killed, but this way the wagon will stop and the lives of five people who were standing in the path of the wagon will be saved. The result is the same: five people will be saved and one will be killed. Again, this was just an experiment. No one is forced to push a person to his death. And yet, the respondents' willingness to act to save the five in exchange for the life of the one decreased significantly when they were required to act in a way that involved them in physical and direct contact with the victim. Robert Wright wrote in "The Atlantic": "Isn't it crazy that you would be willing to kill a man by lifting a lever but refuse on principle to give him a push that would lead to the same result?"

What percentage of golfers are willing to cheat by moving the golf ball to improve their stance? As absurd as this sounds, it depends on the way of moving. Dan Arieli found that their rate increases the more they do it through more indirect means. When Ariely asked if they would move the ball by hand, 2.5% said they would. But when he asked if they would do it with a stick, three times more admitted that they would - 8%. This is despite the result being the same: they would have cheated at the same rate, in the same situation, with the same result. True, the golfers did not murder people every day by shooting from point blank range, did not electrocute anyone and did not push a person under a speeding tram, but only moved a golf ball - it is hard to say that they experienced trauma - and yet, they experienced mental pressure that resulted from the knowledge that they were acting Contrary to the professional ethics of the noble game of golf; And they tried to quiet their consciences by keeping this ethical offense away from themselves as much as possible. If you do it from a distance - about the distance of a golf club - the feeling is probably less bad. Is the seriousness of the act less?

These studies may not have intended to deal with trauma but with the stress of a person who is forced to act contrary to his values ​​or ethics, but they yield significant insights into how stress in general and trauma in particular is inflicted. Is the intensity of trauma really directly related to the tangibility of the event and the way the person who experienced it acts? Is the trauma stronger the closer the person is to the violent events and the more he himself is required to act violently? In the era of remote warfare, was the attrition of the warriors reduced as was manifested, among others, in World War II and Vietnam?

Not necessarily. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was diagnosed among an operator of an unmanned aerial vehicle - UAV - in the US Army, who used aerial weapons for combat and killing purposes from thousands of miles away. He too was diagnosed as experiencing his actions in a profound and shocking way, to the point of trauma, even though he only saw the control panels and the battle scene from afar, on the television screens. It was proposed to develop software that would talk to the drone operators while they were killing and thus give them a human-like environment, in order to integrate the event into a potential web of events and experiences, or, in short - to help them cope.

But most of us don't sit in a virtual cockpit or fly a plane without a pilot; Most of us have never killed and will never kill - not even by remote control - an animal larger than a kitchen cockroach. Why is this discussion even relevant to us?

Yuval Harari and Gary Yurofsky explain: Even if we don't kill directly, with a dagger or a rifle, and even if we don't operate a pentagonal plane with the help of a remote control, we are still responsible - by omission or act - for many deaths every day. It is convenient for us not to think of genocides taking place in Africa and Southeast Asia as we read these words - we simply do not read the foreign news section; It is convenient for us not to think that all the pieces of plastic that serve us - from kitchen utensils to children's toys - originate from the labor of slave children in China and the third world; And that our government - our branch - abuses hundreds of thousands of people every day just because they belong to different ethnic, political or social groups than our own; We are shocked by an investigation that reveals the cruelty of meat factory workers, but it is convenient for us not to think that the milk we drink comes from cows that are separated from their circles on the day they give birth; that the eggs we eat are laid by hens who are crammed in cages side by side, all their short lives, without moving, under artificial light designed to increase the height; that millions of non-edible chicks are shredded in blade shredders every year; And the meat we eat is produced by violently inserting feeding tubes into the throats of birds or by killing day-old calves. We are constantly fed information about this, yet act as if this information does not exist. How come we lie to ourselves so well? It is not possible that we do not understand what is happening. What, are we stupid?

No. This has nothing to do with IQ. The answer lies in our ability to imagine. We belong to the only zoological species that can think in abstract terms about emotions, time, space, and political, social, tribal identification, to the extent that allows us to create nationalities, ethos, religions, and societies - and we apply this talent to distance ourselves from any recognition of the results of our actions; To deceive ourselves about the results of our actions. We know where our food and our children's games come from and how much suffering this entails, but we deceive ourselves so well that it takes a minimal action on our part to deny to ourselves that we are cooperating with this harm, and even suppress from consciousness the fact that we are deceiving ourselves. All that is required on our part is to lift a handle instead of pushing a victim, to move a ball with a golf club instead of by hand, or to move the victim of the electric shocks that are being administered to the other side of the wall, so that only his screams are heard.

But in today's media age, one cannot ignore the evidence that accumulates in an unceasing rush. The more we advance into the technological age, the more the capacity for imagination, introspection, understanding regarding the results of our actions is upgraded. The result is remote control trauma, like the trauma experienced by a drone operator. Not trauma due to fear of death, the smells of battle or the mental stress of killing at close range, but trauma due to moral dissonance. That is why we try to minimize as much as possible the logical and moral inconsistency between our great knowledge of the suffering caused to satisfy our needs - and the fact that we do almost nothing to reduce this suffering. We use our unique powers of abstraction, symbolization, and visualization to distance and separate ourselves from this knowledge. We tell ourselves that it is not us who commits the abuse or murder; or there is a certain justification for this; Or we simply deny the facts, by giving them a different meaning; We use a golf club or a symbolic handle to distance ourselves from the meaning of knowledge, to prevent knowledge from penetrating into awareness.

what have we done It's not that we're on the test; We just helped a friend who was sitting next to us. It's not that we physically pushed a person to his death. We just moved a lever; It's not that we shot at the actual Jews. Others have done it. I was just a cog in the system. I was just following orders. If not me, someone else would do it. In any case, I could not prevent the injustice from happening; It's not that I cheated at golf. It's not really cheating if I just corrected the position of the ball a little. All in all a little touch of the stick. Any denial of this kind is better than daily standing in front of the Marah. And yet, how do we deal with the feelings that permeate our consciousness through fortresses of mental abilities of suppression, denial and hashing out proverbial meanings, feelings that arise in the face of those pieces of information that make it clear to us that whether we like it or not, we are complicit - even if indirectly - in committing injustices?

The initial action pattern taken by a person in the face of a crisis situation, in the face of trauma, is assimilated and embedded in him and will be copied into his reactions in any future stressful situation. Many trauma researchers, from Freud to Arthur Janov, Bessel van der Kolk, Yona Shahar-Levi and others attribute to this imprint phenomenon a neurological basis. The body stores within it every immediate response pattern of the victim to the trauma - whether he fights, flees or freezes (fight, flight or freeze). So, how do you at least reduce the impact of the trauma on the rest of life?

Through DNA samples taken from soldiers in a study carried out in the IDF, it was clarified that the degree of a person's vulnerability to trauma has a genetic component. The researchers came to the conclusion that it is possible to predict which soldiers are at a higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, according to their tendency to avoid or ignore a threat before and during the operational activity. "It seems that avoiding threats ultimately does not serve the avoidant person," the study concluded. However, it does not mean that the intensity of the trauma is determined in a deterministic way. The component of heredity is balanced by the component of self-control, education and environmental nourishment - a classic balance of "heredity vs. nurture" (Nature vs. nurture).

It is possible to reduce the degree of harm by reacting correctly in real time. A study on battle shock revealed that it was less severe the shorter the duration of the injured soldier's stay on the home front after the traumatic event, the shorter the distance to which they were evacuated - evacuation to an association instead of the home front, for example - and the faster they were returned to operational activity, even if within hours.

Apparently, this way of dealing with trauma goes against logic. Isn't it better to evacuate the trauma victim to a quiet environment, to a hospital far from the front line, where he can recover between white sheets, with a supportive medical team and in a yard bathed in sunlight and chirping birds?

No. In fact, such a reference sends the victim the following message: "You are too weak." You can't handle it alone. you need help". Such an attitude causes the victim to see the trauma as a decisive event in his life and to turn it into the axis of his personality, the focus of his self-definition: instead of a person defining himself like this - "Married, father of two, works in a public institution, hobbies: reading and classical music", he defines himself like this: Traumatized."

There is accumulated research experience in cases of ongoing trauma, including Holocaust survivors, children who were exposed to abuse, and soldiers in combat - from World War II, to prisoners of war in Vietnam and up to many of Israel's wars. According to this experience, a person after the trauma is returned to the normal framework of his life more quickly, his chances of returning to a normal life routine are greater, with as little precipitation and latent trauma as possible. The bottom line - as paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to reduce the intensity of "battle shock", you need to restore the soldier to full function as quickly as possible and reduce the amount of time he spends in the home immediately after the original injury. If there is an option of evacuating by air to a hospital and providing a recovery period or evacuating to a union and returning to combat - a union and return to combat is preferable.

In his book "Can't Do It Anymore", the psychologist Shabtai Noy told about a case in which a soldier in the First Lebanon War was shocked in front of the mutilated bodies of his comrades in the battery of cannons, from a direct hit. The commander slapped him and said: "Go into shock later. Now we need you." The soldier returned to full and efficient functioning, and in later tests it became clear that the intensity of the battle shock he experienced - and the post-traumatic disorders he experienced - were significantly less than those of other soldiers. The day after the Battle of the Chinese Farm in the Yom Kippur War, the Hagai soldiers, many of whom were killed, were placed in the "shave-brush" order. The commander brought them back to normal immediately. These examples may be dramatic, but the logic in them is simple: a person who is exposed to trauma and integrates it into a web of actions in which he was also given the ability to demonstrate potency, control over his situation and the ability to perform - such a person, later in his life, when the trauma emerges from the recesses of his memory, it will be associatively and automatically matched to the other actions he did in the same situation. The rise of the feeling of shock to awareness (abreaction) in any future stressful event will be accompanied by a physiological memory - motor and sensory - of potent action, action that is accompanied by ability, a memory of action and not a memory of folding up, hysterical crying or paralysis.

During the battle for the outpost in the trench where Dr. Nachum Varbin was in the Yom Kippur War, Varbin continued to function, made situation assessments and performed surgeries under fire, even when the medic next to him collapsed and began to whimper. And Rabin and dozens of other soldiers were captured by the Egyptians. Upon their return from captivity, some of the captives underwent drug injections and rigid psychological pressure in the Israeli military interrogation facilities, so that they would find out what information they had given in captivity. According to Verbin, he went through these experiences the easiest of all the other subjects. It is possible that his reaction in the battle - the way he analyzed the situation, the decision-making and his actions until he was captured - influenced not only his behavior during the captivity but also the way he acted during the interrogations upon his return to Israel, and throughout his entire life into the future.

The most effective way to allow the victim of trauma not to submit to it, not to make it dominant in his life, is to integrate it into a fabric of activities in which the victim discovers potency: strength, ability, power and control over his environment. In short - return the trauma victim to normal functioning, as quickly as possible. In this way, an opportunity will be created for action that includes the correction of the experience, the correction of the impression that a person has on himself, this way the trauma will be integrated into a life story in which the dominant motif is not escape and failure but coping and growth. Precisely in the place where the fracture occurs, there the person discovers the strongest self-healing abilities.

And if we go back to the beginning of the article, perhaps this courageous way of coping - the attempt to come back to life and work to correct the world day by day, moment by moment - is the way of coping that is required to face our wrong choices and the results of our actions, whether it is difficult for us to stand thinking about the origin of the food that is placed before us On the plate, whether we silently accept the wrongdoings of our government, whether we had to see a man killed because we had to push him under the wheels of a speeding electric car to save five - or whether we just cheated at golf and it's hard for us to sleep at night because of it.

For more information:

Ellis John, 1982, Warriors: The Soldiers at the Edge of the Spear. systems.
Browning Christopher, 2004, Ordinary People: Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the 'Final Solution' in Poland.
Bergman Ronen and Meltzer Gil, 2003, real time. Latest news.
Janov Arthur, 1973, The Primal Scream.
Janov Arthur, 1993, The New Primal Scream.
Gabriel, Richard A. and Savage, Paul L., 1981, Crisis in Command. systems.
Greif Gideon, 1999, Weep Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommandos from Auschwitz.
Bessel van der Kolk, in Dominique Le Capra, 2001, to write history, to write trauma. Wid Vashem Wrestling.
Lewis Harman Judith, 1994, Trauma and Recovery.
Noi Shabtai, 1981, Can't take it anymore: reactions to combat stress. The Ministry of Defense, the publishing house.
Shahar-Levi Yona, 1994, Primary memory captures: Motority as a code for encoding and revitalizing precognitive memories, Conversations: Journal of Psychotherapy, 3, 172, 179-XNUMX