(The current article deals with traumatic experiences and theis affect on the idea of man and worldview. Other articles are found in the column on the right and are arranged by date of posting.)

How do traumatic experiences affect the idea of man and the worldview?

 

“The worst thing is to teach a child with methods based on fear, power, and authority, because then openness and trust will be destroyed. They only achieve the wrong kind of submission.”

- Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

A person's subjective life experiences affect behavior and brain structure and function. In this article, I will first discuss the development and adaptation of the brain. I then move on to describe threats experienced by an individual and their effect on the brain structures of fight-escape-defensive behavior. Next, I will deal with punishment and lying. Then I move from traumatic experiences to coping strategies. I deal with psychic flexibility, striving for non-violence and truth, and telepathy; the shaping of the idea of man and worldview as a result of traumatic experiences.

The healthy ones do not need a healer, but the sick (Matt. 9:12) or those who feel themselves sick. And one does not have to be ill to feel unpleasant feelings such as anxiety, suffering, or torment. Whether a person is ill or healthy according to the concept, he must feel the need to improve his condition in order to be helped. This paper is for him who feels the need to understand the development of the idea of man and worldview, as well as suffering, and to seek a cure for distress and ambiguity.

I present my thoughts as an individual, vulnerable person, as each of us is. The medical education I have acquired and received and my career as a physician for forty years has certainly affected my evaluations. I have not acquired the nominal qualification of a therapist or, in particular, a trauma therapist. However, my ideation have been particularly affected by two fundamental insights related to trauma therapy. These are, firstly, the structural breakdown (dissociation) of personality and the belief in long-term, even permanent, structural damage to the brain caused by trauma. Without these two basic concepts, one cannot explain the world of perceived chaos caused by trauma experiences. Just as biological life cannot be understood without the theory of evolution, so the experience of trauma and its consequences cannot be understood without the structural dissociation of personality and the organic, structural, and functional changes in the nervous system.

 

Introduction

Everyone’s life isn’t just about dancing with roses. Some of us may experience crippling anxiety, the desolation of loneliness, unworthiness, the horror or compulsive thoughts of a trapped person, movements and series of movements, intolerable guilt, and shame that makes the experiencer feel the compelling need to sink into the slit of the earth. These states are repeated, become familiar, pop up to visit without an invitation, and do not follow the order to leave but linger and leave only when they happen to decide for themselves. They arrive, these old acquaintances, whenever and often at the most inopportune time. Entry bans imposed on them do not help. In order to find out the reasons for the visits, it is necessary to make a study trip to the guests' own countries, the birthplaces of the guests, to get acquainted with the conditions in their home. The goal of the excursion is to help these guests to stay under the home rafter or, better yet, prevent the birth of new guests altogether.

An excursionist need not imagine finding the stone of the wise, the ultimate unchanging truth, for the causes of heavy experiences and thoughts. Inventing and broadening new perspectives may be enough for every moment. The future sets its own needs. A useful starting point for exploring painful experiences can be seen as a view of a person on the stage of his or her own life, as an actor regulating the individual in his or her own environment. One must be able to survive, obtain food and shelter, and avoid dangers such as being beaten, even eaten. In addition, he must breed, at least from the point of view of the survival of his species. These are the basic conditions for life to continue. Behavior, and also explicitly subjective feelings and states, should be seen to serve these purposes. The critically arranged and tested concept of evolution and individual development are frameworks without which it is difficult to explain our subject and our life in general.

 

On the development and shaping the brain

The developmental stage after human birth into adulthood is exceptionally long compared to other mammals. During long childhood and adolescence our behavioral regulator, the central nervous system, is significantly shaped. For example, about thirty percent of brain cells die within the first - two years of life. In terms of individual development, ontogenetically, the last maturation does not take place until the age of a couple of decades. The frontal lobes and their connections to other parts of the brain develop latest. The horse's foal is able to walk within the first hours after birth. Man is not able to do the same until about the age of one year. The horse's youth is likely to end by the age of a couple of years. The human brain, like a horse, is shaped by interactions with the environment, especially with other members of its specie. A man does not become a man with good social abilities alone or in very deficient growth environments. Man learns to act as man only in the company of other men and a horse as a horse only in the company of other horses. Real or imaginary examples of failed growth can be found in wolf children, a girl growing up in a barrel, and in the orphanages in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The way in which social relations take place is crucial for human development and is reflected in the future subjective sense of well-being, intellectual level, behavior and worldview and the idea of man.

The realization of different human functions relies on the brain structures inherent in that activity. Each activity has its own main structures that work in collaboration with other structures. (Hormones, oxidation state, carbon dioxide, sugar, etc. also act as common shaping factors.) These structures and their function develop and form individually in their own time, according to the phylogenetic order. They are shaped by an individual’s interactive experiences. Current neuroscience publications are flooded with the mechanisms of brain modification and their temporal duration, behavior, experiential counterparts, from the brain region level to cellular, subcellular, and molecular levels. A closer look at them in this paper would take the presentation too far away from the main theme.

The long helplessness of a human child and the living at the full mercy of caregivers requires special caring-attachment behavior (and caring-attachment experience) on the part of the caregiver and experience and security experience on the part of the child. Care includes proximity and taking care of food, drink, cleanness and warmth, as well as protection from accidents and attacking animals and people. In the beginning, the baby demands that the needs be met immediately when the need arises. Learning to tolerate the fulfilment of a need is an essential part of a child’s growth and predicts future success in life. Repeated disregard or even punishment of a child’s needs for attention-seeking behaviors, such as crying, obviously structurally damages the brain and forms the basis for the experience of being rejected, which later manifests itself in many contexts as a stereotypical experience as well as behavior in relationships.

 

Adverse experiences during childhood and adolescence

1. Fight-escape-submit experience and behavior

The success in resisting being beaten or eaten and avoiding other dangers is a vital condition for a individual. Thus, learning about threats takes place in the brain quickly and permanently, otherwise new threats could be anticipated and avoided unsatisfactorily. A human child, like an animal, tries to avoid threats and, if she does not succeed, defends herself by fighting. If the fight is not successful either, or the resistance is overwhelming, the child will submit to what is necessary. A physically punished child is paralyzed in terror by stinging strokes on her buttocks. She is alleged to have done something wrong. She feels she is of wrong sort in the mind of the punisher. With her insufficient experience and undeveloped brain, a child cannot comprehend, let alone analyze, her whipping. Understanding the reason and unreasonableness of the punishment is not facilitated by the probable fact that those close who see the abuse may not defend the one under the punishment or they accept the incident, or even call for more hurtful violence (the buckle of the belt). The event will drill definitely in the small brain. No matter if the biological mechanism were an increasing or decreasing of synaptic weight, protein synthesis initiation, the creation of new synapses and neurons, histone acetylation, DNA methylation, or all these or other known or as yet unknown mechanisms, it is difficult to question the preservation of the event as neural structure and the tendency that the experience of the event will easily reactivate spontaneously. Even if the incident itself is not remembered later, panic pops up in a later life to visit without prior notice, often in the most inappropriate context. The guest demands all the attention and the host is not given the opportunity for any other activities; the guest takes all the attention. The host does not get even one word thought or said. The brainstem activity that underlies defensive behavior is self-sufficient, completely shutting down higher-level brain functions such as the connections to the frontal lobes that regulate defensive behavior. The guest leaves after a moment but calls his friends anxiety and shame as troublesome companion to the host. As all this happens in the context of a host’s social interaction, the consequences are or can be catastrophic. (Van Der Hart O, Nijenhuis E and Steele K. The Haunted Self. Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization.)

 

2. Raising by punishment

In their attempt to raise their children to behave acceptably or to eradicate reprehensible behavior, parents have not always been or have not been able to take into account current methods of developmental and educational psychology. Parents seem to have known the biblical teaching, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son” (Proverbs 13:24). So they have rushed to beat their children in order to make them good. The law prohibiting corporal punishment of children did not enter into force in Finland until the beginning of 1984. Not only was corporal punishment largely accepted in post-World War II Finland, but reprimanding, blaming, humiliating, defeating, denying the expression of a child's feelings (you are shouting like volves in the wilderness) and insulting shame (shame yourself, you good-for-nothing) were accepted. The inherent tendency of children to interact with each other was also not always supported (villages walker). Although, in return, a child could get support that promoted her self-esteem, received acceptance verbally and nonverbally, the scale was too often tilted towards the blaming side of upbringing. Nor was the school system better; teaching focused on finding mistakes, obeying, and subjugating.

Both a child and an adult seek approval and support. The brain’s action loops of experiencing worthlessness are built in the small brain as she feels repeatedly lacking the attention and approval she desires. The feeling of worthlessness can be enhanced by emphasizing the child’s profound insignificance, incompetence, and inability. Moreover, belonging to a poor, considered as worthless and simple people, does not improve the child's sense of self-worth. The theory of social and economic evolution with a strong value charge was deeply rooted in Finnish society in the 20th century, with the scale of values ​​ranging from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists and farmers, continuing to the urban industrial and merchant class. At the top are learned, money-rich and influential politicians. Fathers who returned from World War II and mothers who experienced the war earned their living for themselves and their children mainly through horse-drawn farming. This majority did not receive much appreciation from the townspeople, especially those in the capital. Poverty in rural and urban areas was not highly valued. Current terms for deprivation include for example down and outs or family poverty. Being underestimated, even despised and ignored is not conducive to self-esteem, which in turn can lead to an inability to say and express one’s feelings.

 

3. Lying

Lying is specifically related to human social activity. Admittedly, man can also lie to himself, either consciously or unconsciously. Man has developed an exact “lie-revealing machinery” that combines and interprets fine subtleties in the behavior of others. One can subjectively know the truth of a matter but can lie to others. A child, like an adult, can keep his wishes true and believe in his dream reality. The beautification of truth can rise from the fear of shame. Fear of punishment also tempts you to tell white lies. Good relationships are based on trust. Therefore, it is important that the motives and behavior of a fellow human being are predictable. One must share truthful information. Confidence can be lost because of just one lie and it can be that a cheater does not get new trust built despite persistent trying. It is difficult for a child, a few years old, to distinguish between a truth and a fairy tale, which is why a parent should guide to the truth through interaction and empathy with the child. Reproach, blaming, intimidation, or even physical punishment leads to feelings of rejection, loneliness, shame, and injustice, as well as curling up in oneself. A child can become frightened. Reactions are exacerbated in a child who has tendency to feel easily guilty and who is pronouncedly responsible. The situation may be exacerbated by appointment (schizophrenic).

A child may feel unable to think or do things that parents and other people will not accept or despise. He knows he will be punished if he tells his thoughts or others become aware of his actions. However, the child's thoughts and actions are basically harmless, related to normal development, but extremely important for the child. A punished child drifts into her own worlds in fear. His undeveloped function of abstraction is incapable of dealing with perceived injustice. The lonely, emotionally orphaned, easily sets excessive expectations for budding friendships or social relationships, and as the relationship breaks down, he drifts into more and more intolerable loneliness.

The child has learned, through punishment, loneliness, and prosecution, or at the threat of these, to know things he or she should not do, nor should he or she think or feel. On the other hand, he has learned other things that are permissible to feel, think, and do. He looks outside for rules and tries to fit his own feelings, thoughts, and actions into them. Many congregations, be it political or religious such as reformism like Lestadianism, require children to conform to their doctrines and norms of behavior. An instilled and ingrained compulsion to follow the rules of authority can remain the undertone shackling free and deliberate thinking. Reducing the sticking to compliance is a proven challenge and it cannot be promised that this weighty self-education work will be a complete success.

 

The impact of adverse experiences on some aspects of the idea of man and worldview

1. People are malevolent

The more injuring an experience is and the closer person produce it, the more certainly the experience will be stored in the brain and affect our future perception. The effect takes place unconsciously and this unconscious part stays mostly uncovered by our conscious self. Humans (and animals in suitable areas) develop sensitive “senses” (“antennas”) to detect a threat in an area of ​​violence, aggression, nullification, half-heartedness, rejection, and so on. Attention and interpretations thus skew in the direction of the threat. The operating model solidifies practically unchanged and thus petrifies the idea of man. If a person finds out that she or he has in perceptions sensitized herself/himself to, for example, aggression, he or she may consider in his or her observations to minimize the traits of aggression in fellow human beings. Further, the attenuation of aggression assessment is overemphasised with the consequence that danger signals are ignored. Traumatic experiences lead to a rigidity of flexible assessment.

 

2. Violence - non-violence

The problem of physical violence plagues the mind of the person who experienced the violence. As the capacity for abstraction develops, or without a conscious process of abstraction, he may find the solution to the problem of violence to be the transfer of the consequences of violence to fellow human beings; he can himself become a perpetrator. A sad current example is dictator Vladimir Putin. According to Helsingin Sanomat Monthly Supplement No. 601 (4/22), Putin's “Father did not spare the joke. Putin was lashed repeatedly for diverse causes. Once, a teacher visited Putin’s home because he wanted to discuss the boy’s bad attitude at school. And the father said, ‘What can I to do with it? After all, I can't beat the boy to the point of his death’.” Today, we can read how ruthlessly and brutally he is now disciplining both his own people and the people of Ukraine. Words are incapable of telling the immense anxiety, pain, and agony he causes.

The opposite solution is to abandon violence completely. The innocence and submission of Jesus Christ in the face of violence has been enshrined in Christianity for nearly two thousand years. By this act Jesus, according to Father God's plan, has taken upon Himself, no more or less than, the sins of all men. It is said that the human Jesus experienced that he was rejected by God the Father. True followers of Jesus Christ should follow his example. Violence is overcome by giving up violence. Without going farther to the many perspectives of renouncing violence and self-defense (complete submission), the victim of ill-treatment can find an echo in these teachings. Let this world go its way, the experiencer moves into eternal peace as the mood is shown in Verdi's final theme in Aida. The non-violent are rewarded in the metaphysical worlds.

 

3. The truth

The most positive consequence of stigmatizing a child as a liar and the companions of stigmatization such as disregarding, blaming, punishing, intimidation, demanding to believe a certain idea of man or worldview, and belittling the child’s own actions, may be his or her burning desire for truth. The child feels that he or she is being treated unfairly and that his or her thoughts and actions are being interpreted incorrectly. Indeed, he concludes to become uncompromisingly truthful in his true heart. He begins to wonder about the basis of his own (sense) world of experience. He is, naturally, looking for the idea of man and worldview system to believe in. He is after an order for false interpretations, contradictions, and distressing chaos. All available doctrines and belief system turn out, after scrutinizing, lame, incomplete, or flawed in one and often in many ways. As he grows up, he may be disappointed to find that he has, too often and for too long time, been left in the traps of the doctrine he had become familiar with, even though he has for a longer period realized that the attentions of the doctrine have on wrong areas of knowledge. Wrong conclusions are drawn from imaginary or erroneous facts. Habit and intellectual laziness may prevent one’s conscious loosening from the erroneous models of explanation of the world. Fear of punishment can also prevent detachment. Being approved is such a valuable experience that one can tolerate ideas and interpretations that conflict with one’s own ideas as long as one becomes accepted as a person.

Meditation has been recommended for the self-help of the wounded and left alone. However, practice guides and instructors in the field may be superficial. Meditation, even if performed with dedicated competence, is not always a sufficient or correct way to gain truth and knowledge. In the best exercises, things are also observed with mind’s eyes and broken down and combined. An important part is also taking a third-person perspective on your own experiencing and thinking self. Exercises develop self-discipline and perseverance. Exercises can occasionally relieve fear, panic, anxiety, and pain. Therapeutic exercises should assess misconceptions and misinterpretations that one has done, especially about painful interpersonal issues. (On meditation and the biological mechanisms of fear reduction, see Hölzel B. K. et al 2016). The tendency to panic caused by abuse does not very well agree to stay in their fields, but without prior notice can pop into place in meditation exercises, impairing concentration and analysis. And there he is in fear and terror, the peace has retreated.

Adopting a scientific perspective is the surest way to acquire new knowledge and assess truthfulness. Scientific study focuses on the research literature selected for a study, the investigator learns how to collect data in the chosen field, which (mathematical) methods of analysis to choose, how to draw conclusions, and evaluate the reliability of conclusions. The fervent seeker of truth longs, in my mind, ultimately for the king of science, that is, the philosophy of science. He can question the starting points (premises) of thought experiment or real-world research, exchange them for others, re-model data collection and analytics, and then do the same again with new premises.

 

4. Telepathy

Ignoring, belittling, and coercing can lead to an inability to say and express one’s feelings to loved ones as well as anyone. According to telepathy theory, thoughts and emotions can be transferred between people extrasensory, that is, without known physical senses, the most important of which are hearing and sight. In his or her loneliness and inability to engage in meaningful interaction, the young person may seek to resort to an easier way to communicate; he could rely on the ability to perceive another’s thoughts and feelings directly without caring words and visual perceptions. Similarly, others could detect the movements of his soul and spirit. Proponents of telepathy theory argue that telepathy is a skill that can be learned and developed. However, in developmental exercises, the most obvious danger is to drift into the world of imagination. The need for reality testing can threaten to be overlooked. I will not delve in this presentation into the success of telepathy after the exercises.

 

Conclusions

I am by no means claiming that the reasons for the events and experiences I have presented, and the interpretations that follow them, could certainly or even apparently be the ones presented by me. They are possible, intuitively true stories to a man himself. The explanatory factors and explanators I present are extremely complex and at many different levels of roughness of phenomena; from the molecular level to psychology, sociology, and subjective experiences. One thing is certain, however: without the absolute unconditional and unreserved acceptance of every human being by default, the irrevocable recognition of human dignity, and the realization of empathic social interaction (at least in thought), all reflection and drawing of conclusions is futile.

The purpose of my presentation is not to describe in a versatile way the positive and negative factors of a child's and young person's life, but to focus on their disadvantageous (environmental) factors, which may probably have an effect on described parts of the idea of man and worldview. If a child were to encounter only the described unfavorable factors, his or her development and future would become sad. Versatile positive factors are needed for an individual to develop into an independent actor of his or her life. A child has astounding, outright surprising, innate ability and power to absorb information from the impulses of the environment, to process the information, and to transform the contents of information into actions that promotes one’s survival and well-being.

Man is born with a very undeveloped central nervous system. Long childhood and adolescence shape the brain into an information machine that is suitable for the environment and exploits its environment. Traumatic experiences produce known psychopathological conditions as well as ways to process information. Anxiety, fear, panic, compulsive toughts and actions are such. They cause subjective suffering and make it difficult to adapt to the environment and succeed in life. These experiences affect the construction of the idea of man and worldview of a child and a young person, as well as an adult. Clear neurobiological and physiological equivalents can be found for the conditions and ideas.

It is of paramount importance to pay the attention of human beings as well as society (political decision-making, education, consideration of scientific achievements in decision-making) in children’s development and the promotion of well-proportioned development, nurturing, and education. There has been a delightful progress in the field during the last decades in Finland and at least in most countries in the West. Many third sector actors are involved in children’s well-balanced upbringing, equality, non-violence, and access to the knowledge of the truth.

 

Literature

Graeber David and Wengrow David. The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 120 Broadway, New York. 2021. ISBN 9780374157357.

Hagihara, K.M., Bukalo, O., Zeller, M. et al. Intercalated amygdala clusters orchestrate a switch in fear state. Nature 594, 403–407 (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03593-1.

Hölzel, B. K., Brunsch, V., Gard, T., Greve, D. N., Koch, K., Sorg, C., Lazar, S. W., & Milad, M. R. (2016). Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Fear Conditioning, and The Uncinate Fasciculus: A Pilot Study. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 10, 124. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00124.  

Van Der Hart O, Nijenhuis E and Steele K. The Haunted Self. Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. W.W. Norton & Company. 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-70401-3.

Van Der Hart O, Nijenhuis E and Steele K. Vainottu mieli. Rakenteellinen dissosiaatio ja kroonisen traumatisoitumisen hoitaminen. Traumaterapiakeskus. 2006. ISBN 978-951-98206-4-4.