J wrote –
This is a sociological and population-level conceptualization that needs individual study, such as you have done, Bob. What can we anticipate in the future from helpless children massively exposed to horrific losses, scenes and experiences in Gaza, or any other place?
Such a pertinent question, J, and until we grasp a pragmatic answer, our species prognosis is grim.
HOWEVER, what cheers me are two very basic human facts – (1) children are impressionable, and (2) humans are resilient.
The paragraphs I repeated (see below) from The Observer about children in Gaza, 20 years ago, growing up expecting to die, is soul chilling. This is precisely the uniform message I received from every one of the 50 murderers I worked with – the world, for them, is a grim, terminal place, no future, no self-esteem, no social skills. Why exert yourself? There’s nothing to be gained. Emotional pessimism was rife. “I could kill people as easily as picking up that cup” said one ex-hitman for a drug gang. And I believed him. There was nothing to it. “They’d be lunatic to let me out, now”, is what he also said – and again he was right.
So where does this inhumanity come from? People vary, religions vary – and each to his/her own. But for me, and the sole reason I agreed to work in Parkhurst Prison in the first place is as follows – it comes exclusively from childhoods, unfriendly childhoods at that. You are what you're taught (at least initially). More details in my book, link below.
PLUS >> the elephant in the room – frontal blockages – they couldn’t see this. They couldn’t think it. Trauma blocked revision, re-setting, rearranging their mental furniture. The world had become fixed in childhood, terror prevented it being updated, so there was no room for discussion – everyone out there was just as determined to extinguish you, as those you had ever met as a child. Grim? – I should say.
So what to do? The front door is closed. Powerful people are dangerous people. If you try to change this, as every doctor should, indeed every world citizen – and you tell them you are stronger than their childhood influencers, THEN ipso facto, you are too risky to approach, or allow near. You're just as deadly as those who terrified them when small. If you don’t know what you're doing, or you mutter about incomprehensibles (of which we have a few in these posts) – then they can disregard you as being inconsequential. So unless you creep up on the terror which paralyses their thinking, progress is retrograde. But paradoxically, you have to do so, with the utmost confidence — a tricky combination — cautious, but robust, not easy to achieve, but oh, so worthwhile when you can. . . . .
Back to the two basic human facts – (1) children are impressionable, and (2) humans are resilient. So far, the impression has been dire – no one loves you, there’s nothing to be gained from them, so why not kill them? (cut them up? slaughter their young? cut off their water supply?) This negative impression goes in, and can be very deep. However, ipso facto again, a different (and opposite) impression can also go in – once you establish an ethos, a viable channel of communication. Far from easy, but doable.
It's not easy to reverse deep impressions, they are so deep they’ve become blocked behind those frontal blockages. So you have to know what you're doing. You have to have absolute confidence that you can reverse the ill-effects of trauma, you have to ignore all the pessimistic moans of disillusioned ‘experts’, dogmatic politicians and other myopes – and say, (2) humans are resilient.
Talk to them (about everything else) as if they mattered, discuss with them how you, personally, though strong, decline to rubbish people routinely, or take your revenge, as is the norm.
No, you offer a different path. You don’t force this down their throats, you don’t get a bigger stick to quell them – no, you entice them out from within their snail shell, you surround them with benignity, but above all, you enhance their ‘agency’ – you tell them they matter, their consent matters, their ‘intent’ matters.
So many voices are against this way of overcoming trauma. BUT if you persevere, then you are in a win-win situation. In Parkhurst Prison, they eventually formed a village – “Don’t tell ME about your being sex abused, go and tell Dr Bob”. This from non-empathy, soulless ‘psychopaths’, whose trauma was (and is) deemed quite incurable.
And of course, even when it works, and works well, you are up against established doctrine which says it doesn’t. No alarm bells being rung for 3 years, down from 20 a year for 7 – a world record in any maximum security prison wing – this is as easily discounted as the clinical fact of frontal blockages.
But if you see it work, if you see humans blossoming, taking up OU degree courses, recommencing literacy classes – it stops chilling your soul, and warms it. Humans are so resilient.
Thanks J, for asking.
Rock on
Bob
~~~o0o~~~
Excerpts from The Observer, 15th October 2023, p 10 by Chris McGreal.
“Two decades ago the mother of nine-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadallah described to me how she twice lost her child. Once to a worship of death and then to death itself. Living in southern Gaza, the Palestinian boy had come to accept destruction and killing as normal, and to admire the men attacking Israel and what he saw as the heroic circumstances of their deaths. . . .
“One day an Israeli soldier shot a shy eight-year-old who lived on Rahman's street, Haneen Suliaman, as she walked back from the shops with her mother. "Rahman went to the morgue and kissed Haneen," Attalah, Rahman’s mother, said. "He came home and told us he had promised the dead girl he would die too. I made him apologise to his father." Rahman was in school a few weeks later when an Israeli bullet apparently fired randomly from a watchtower hit a Palestinian girl in the head. Lessons were cancelled and Rahman defied his mother to join yet another funeral. As he hung a Palestinian flag on the fence enclosing Gaza, an Israeli bullet caught Rahman under his left eye and killed him instantly. Palestinian boys in Gaza who were Rahman's age in 2003 are now adults. . . . .
“. . . . Abu Shawarib [a social worker] told me that many children came to welcome the prospect of being “martyred”. “The martyr is in paradise. He has glory here and in the afterlife where it is so much better than life in Rafah," she said. "The children see many people killed, so they come to expect to be killed."
~~~o0o~~~
Professor Bob Johnson, DSc(hon), MRCPsych, MRCGP, PhD(med computing), MA (Psychol), MBCS, DPM, MRCS, School of Psychology, University of Bolton, BL3 5AB, UK. GMC num. 0400150
How Verbal Physiotherapy works - link to ebook - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/892956