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I am using “toxic culture” to characterize something even broader and more deeply rooted: the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.
It is my contention that by its very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, as they have done with increasing force over the past several decades.
I will make the case that much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and that to meet modern society’s criteria for normality is, in many ways, to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our Nature-given needs
Far more than a lack of technological acumen, sufficient funds, or new discoveries, our culture’s skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world,
health and illness are not random states in a particular body or body part. They are, in fact, an expression of an entire life lived, one that cannot, in turn, be understood in isolation: it is influenced by—or better yet, it arises from—a web of circumstances, relationships, events, and experiences.
The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.” Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.
even after we become language-endowed, some wounds are imprinted on regions of our nervous systems having nothing to do with language or concepts; this includes brain areas, of course, but the rest of the body, too.
Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics.
As I use the word, “trauma” is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them;
“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people.
Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be.
To quote Peter Levine once more, “Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.”6
To sum up, then, capital-T trauma occurs when things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened, as, for example, a child being abused, or violence in the family, or a rancorous divorce, or the loss of a parent.
Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted,
“Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.
In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body.
A traumatized nervous system, on the other hand, never gets to unfreeze.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote the psychologist Rollo May.12 Trauma robs us of that freedom.
Response flexibility is a function of the midfrontal portion of our cerebral cortex. No infant is born with any such capacity:
The freedom to choose develops as the brain develops. The more severe and the earlier the trauma, the less opportunity response flexibility has to become encoded in the appropriate brain circuits, and the faster it becomes disabled. One becomes stuck in predictable, automatic defensive reactions, especially to stressful stimuli. Emotionally and cognitively, our range of movement becomes well-nigh sclerotic—and the grea...
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People bearing trauma’s scars almost uniformly develop a shame-based view of themselves at the core, a negative self-perception most of them are all too conscious of.
Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.
It is a marker of our culture’s insanity that certain individuals who flee from shame into a shameless narcissism may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success.
chronic depression that began when I was about 10, but instead of killing my will, it motivated me: I thought if I could be good enough at whatever task, great or small, that was before me, I might have a few minutes of happiness.”
Trauma, especially severe trauma, imposes a worldview tinged with pain, fear, and suspicion: a lens that both distorts and determines our view of how things are. Or it may, through the sheer force of denial, engender a naively rosy perspective that blinds us to real and present dangers—a veneer concealing fears we dare not acknowledge. One may also come to dismiss painful realities by habitually lying to oneself and others.
what our bodies experience from conception onward cannot but affect how we think, feel, perceive, and behave. This, in a nutshell, is psychoneuroimmunology’s core lesson.
the demonstrated link between the brain’s fear center, the amygdala, and cardiovascular disease.
Like its cousin, the pain response, stress is a mandatory survival function for any living being. When activated, our stress apparatus immediately empowers us to confront or escape threats to our existence or to the existence or well-being of those we care for. It’s an impressive whole-body event involving virtually every organ and system.
While acute stress is a necessary reaction that helps maintain our physical and mental integrity, chronic stress, ongoing and unrelieved, undermines both.
The opportunity we have today is to create a multivalent health care approach that appreciates the impact of “nonthings” on the “thinglike” bodies we’ve come to be so marvelously expert in.
If we want a clear and accurate view of human health, we will have to broaden our understanding of “bodymind” to include the myriad roles that other minds and other bodies play in shaping our well-being, indeed our very sense of self.
traumatologist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has noted that “our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms.”
“When I was in medical school,” he writes, “many of the fine teachers we had approached their patients, and their students, as if they had no center of inner experience—no subjective internal core we might call our mental life. It was as if we were just bags of chemicals and bodily organs without a self, without a mind.”
Given their vulnerability and dependence, children’s physiology is especially susceptible to the emotional states of their caregivers. Young kids’ stress hormone levels, for example, are heavily influenced by the emotional atmosphere in the home, whether outright conflict or bristling tension.9 Asthma is a well-studied example: the inflammation of the child’s lungs is directly affected by the mother’s or father’s emotions.10 In the words of a recent review: “It has been consistently shown that parents in an unfavorable mental health state such as ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety,’ ‘stress,’ or ‘chronic
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Racism is another risk factor for asthma. In a large cohort of Black American women, experiences of racial discrimination were associated with the adult onset of the disease.
Experience, in other words, determines how our genetic potential expresses itself in the end.
It isn’t that genes don’t matter—they certainly do—only that they cannot dictate even the simplest behaviors, let alone account for most illnesses or address possible cures for them. Far from being the autonomous arbiters of our destinies, genes answer to their environment; without environmental signals, they could not function. In fact, life for us would be impossible if not for the epigenetic mechanisms that “turn” genes “on” or “off” in response to signals from within and from outside the body.
Through ingenious manipulation of the rat population studied—inconceivable in human research—both the physiological and behavioral effects of early nurturing patterns were found to be nongenetic: that is, not transmitted through the so-called genetic code, which remained unchanged. Rather, they were epigenetic—in other words, determined by how the various kinds of maternal nurturing influenced gene activity in the offspring’s brain.
Telomeres have been called “cellular clocks,” in that they are a measure of biological rather than chronological age. Two people, even identical twins, could be the same age as computed in years, months, weeks, and days, yet one may be biologically older than the other,
That’s because stress shortens telomeres.
Similar results were seen in caregivers of people with dementia: shortened telomeres and impaired immunity, reinforcing the idea that “chronic psychological stress has a negative impact on immune cell function and may accelerate their aging.”
Life in our current culture, I believe, makes many of us experimental mice subject to “chronic variable stress” beyond our control.
Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories, all interacting with the physical and psychological environment. It is often a manifestation of ingrained personality traits, yes—but that personality is not who we are any more than are the illnesses to which it may predispose us.
Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars. A lifetime study of the internal-combustion engine would not help anyone to understand our traffic problems … A traffic jam is due to a failure of the normal relationship between driven cars and their environment and can occur whether they themselves are running normally or not. —Sir David Smithers, Lancet, 1962
Beyond the declarations of war, there is another, even more popular class of misapprehensions that cloud our view of disease: “I have cancer.” “She has MS.” “My nephew has ADD.” Embedded in each phrase is the unexamined assumption that there is an I (or a someone) distinct and independent from the thing called disease,
The disorganizing impact of stress hormones on the immune system as a risk for cancer is far from a scientific secret.
After all, if disease is a manifestation of something in our lives rather than merely their cruel disruptor, we have options: we can pursue new understandings, ask new questions, perhaps make new choices. We can take our rightful place as active participants in the process, rather than remain its victims,
In men, the immune system’s capacity to react to prostate cancer was diminished in those with a tendency to suppress anger.
