Biological Wounding

 
     Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence maps out the biological and psychological wounding that all forms of terrorism leave on its victims. Terrorism of all kinds leaves profound imprints on the brain as it does to the collective consciousness of humanity. There is no real way to measure the terrible and horrible hand of terrorism especially that type that happens in or near the home. But we can see it now more clearly in world events and in our prisons, in crime, in rape and child abuse statistics, in almost everything up to including the destruction of the natural environment of our planet. Speaking more of the individual effects, Goleman talks first about how violence perpetuated upon us by others “shatters assumptions about the trustworthiness of people and the safety of the interpersonal world. Within and instant, the social world becomes a dangerous place, one in which people are potential threats to your safety.” This and the feelings of helplessness that accompanies being singled out for attack leads to basic changes in brain chemistry and psychology known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), something that is experienced by war veterans to house wives battered by their husbands. According to Dr. Dennis Charney, a Yale psychiatrist, “Victims of a devastating trauma may never be the same biologically. It does not matter if it was the incessant terror of combat, torture, or repeated abuse in childhood, or a one-time experience, like being trapped in a hurricane or nearly dying in an auto accident. All uncontrollable stress can have the same biological impact.” Dr. John Krystal, director of the Laboratory of Clinical Psychopharmacology said, “Say someone being attacked with a knife knows how to defend himself and takes action, while another person in the same predicament thinks, ‘I’m dead.’ The helpless person is the one more susceptible to PTSD afterward. It’s the feeling that your life is in danger and there is nothing you can do to escape it-that’s the moment the brain change begins.” Most terrorist attacks, including rape, have this element of helplessness in it.  

      Torture by definition fits this bill perfectly for torture, however it is administered, always have three elements that maximize the creation of PTSD: 1. Those who were tortured were powerless to prevent it.  2. Whether the torture was physical, sexual or psychological, those who were tortured suffered extreme pain.  3. For those who were tortured, their survival was in question. It is hardly necessary to point out that in these three elements, there is no difference between torture inflicted upon prisoners and the torture that can be inflicted upon helpless children in the case of their sexual abuse or rape. The suffering of children who are unable to tell about it, however, is downgraded to "abuse" while survivors of war crimes are accorded the dignity of a term that accurately describes their experience; they were "tortured!" The words we use are important, more important that we would believe and this book hopes to change both the meaning and use of the word terrorism. There is a conspiracy in the human race, a trait of the collective unconscious, and that is to diminish the pain and suffering we feel and the empathy we might feel for others and their plight. It is part of our normal psychological makeup yet it is broadly dysfunctional. HeartHealth speaks much about this subject for it has great implications for the state of our being.  

Permanent Biological & Psychological Change

 
      Goleman notes that PTSD represents a “perilous lowering of the neural set point for alarm, leaving the person to react to life’s ordinary moments as thought they were emergencies.” The changes takes the bodies endocrine system out of balance with the end result being the body is tensed and stressed out for an emergency that is not really present in reality. But as Goleman notes while quoting a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, “If you’ve been through Auschwitz and you don’t have nightmares, then you are not normal.” It is normal to be and feel hurt when attacked, normal to suffer for the absence of love and caring in this world, especially when it all collapses into violence done deliberately to our body or being. When it comes to child abuse the long-term effects include fear, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behavior, poor self-esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships. Clinical findings of adult victims of sexual abuse include problems in interpersonal relationships associated with an underlying mistrust. And generally, adult victims of incest have a severely strained relationship with their parents that are marked by feelings of mistrust, fear, ambivalence, hatred, and betrayal, feelings that may extend to all family members and to society in general. These people are all victims of a most personal and intimate type of terrorism, one that is often to much to bare. 

     The general effects to a terrorist suicide bomb attack are instant death or heavy physical trauma, mutilation, and destruction of physical property. Of course there is the same emotional and PTSD response but this is no worse for victims of one kind of violence or another. But terrorism does not stop here. There are millions of people in the world who suffer and die of starvation because of the terror of economic injustices and many millions who suffer from enforced ignorance through the denial of education and the opportunities education provides. There are even millions of women who suffer the terrorism of their cultures in Africa who have their genitals mutilated in the name of what? The point to this book is that terrorism hurts, all forms of terrorism hurt and causes suffering that can lead to never ending agonies of being.