Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Living with a degree of traumatic shame is the norm rather than the exception, but as Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark note it can take a deadly, deflective form. ‘When violations [of privacy or selfness] occur in chronic or traumatic form, then shame becomes the core of severe structures of defense in the traumatized individual or community …’ This shame then manifests as an ‘aggressive shamelessness’ that Adamson and Clark view as having ‘invaded modern life’. Men seem especially prone to violent expressions of it, and feminine beings bear the brunt of it, since they are positioned in patriarchy to be controlled, oppressed, annihilated or exploited by masculine beings.

  There is substantial evidence that bullies in our society tend to do well, especially in male-dominated corporate life and the military–industrial complex, both of which, in their specific ways, valorise, support and reward bullying. Bullies are disproportionately represented at the top of business and politics. But what becomes of the bullied, and of those most wounded and victimised by other means? What becomes of all those traumatised by ‘attacks on value’ or scarred by rape culture? Do any of us come through unscathed? We fill prisons, offices, psych wards, housing commission slums, Buddhist monasteries, what remains of women’s crisis accommodation. We become writers, drink in pubs, sleep rough and over-achieve. If we have the means, why we might even end up at a Tony Robbins event (please take note of your reaction: a quiz follows). Did you a) bristle at the mention of his name, b) smirk, c) feel a surge of hope, d) determine, in the beat of a second, to skip over the following section in protest? Stay with me.

  Robbins came to prominence along with the likes of Louise Hay during the 1980s pop-psychology/New Age/self-help boom. Joe Berlinger’s film Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru documents Robbins’ seventy-fourth Date with Destiny seminar, which ran for six twelve-hour days in Florida in 2014 and cost each person $4,995 to attend. Robbins, once a Californian kid who grew up with an abusive, alcoholic mother and an absent father, is now a role model and hero to millions worldwide. ‘I constructed this Tony Robbins guy. I built this motherfucker,’ he declares proudly at the start of the event, seemingly to indicate two things: that the Tony Robbins he was before he built the Tony Robbins he is now was not a Tony Robbins worth being, and that those in the audience could also rebuild themselves into people worth being and he was about to show them how. A voiceover claims that Robbins has helped more than four million (the number of people to have attended his events during their twenty-five-year run at the time the film was made), including luminaries such as Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Robbins’ simple statement, ‘If I can discover what beliefs and values control me, I can literally re-design me’, describes his central thesis. This poses a challenge to the conventional wisdom of much theoretical and clinical trauma theory, which highlights trauma’s resistance to control (or even access) by the conscious mind. It also presents a promise irresistible to the many who are suffering trauma’s ill effects, but the $500 million question (Robbins’ net worth according to celebritynetworth.com) is this: can he deliver the goods? Can we really change ourselves and our lives regardless of how much of a clusterfuck of trauma we stagger out of?

  I first encountered Robbins and Hay decades ago, a few years after I left rehab, when someone suggested I try the positive affirmations espoused by Hay, who claims to have cured herself of cancer through positive thinking. Previously a die-hard cynic, I was trying to practise an open mind. I was desperate to feel better, to live better, so I pushed through my scepticism and, squirming, practised positive affirmations while looking in the mirror, to no obvious avail. While cognitive-based therapies of various kinds can be useful interventions for reframing problematic thought patterns, claims about improving mental and physical health through affirmations are a vexed prospect when it comes to chronic post-traumatic stress symptomology. Experts have established that the parts of the brain most affected by psychic trauma are not necessarily the same part of the brain that practises affirmations.

  Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux describes the amygdala, one of the areas most identified with trauma, as an unconscious processor separate from the conscious system. He states, ‘It’s like a default unconscious, as opposed to being the Freudian sense of unconscious – something that was conscious, but was too anxiety provoking and therefore shipped to the unconscious. The amygdala gets direct sensory information and learns and stores information on its own, and that information that’s stored then controls emotional responses.’ The amygdala is associated with ‘implicit memory’, which doesn’t require conscious involvement. The hippocampus, however, another area of the brain closely linked to trauma, is crucial to the process of memory being available to consciousness: neuroscientist Marc Alain Züst calls it the ‘place of interaction between unconscious and conscious memories’. Thus, there is doubtless some capacity to engage with this subconscious region through various forms of therapeutic interventions.

  Bessel van der Kolk, a leading expert in trauma studies, acknowledges that ‘language gives us the power to change ourselves and others’ but he does not seem to support the hypothesis that it’s as simple as repeating affirmative phrases. In fact, he goes on to say that language offers this potential ‘by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning’, which is a far more complex operation than the repetition of conscious thought and statements deemed ‘positive’. This means the claims made by Hay and ilk for ‘positive affirmations’ are questionable, to say the least, as far as severely or chronically traumatised individuals are concerned. Speaking of the tendency of education systems to focus on cognitive development at the expense of more holistic approaches that integrate the physical with the psycho-emotional, van der Kolk states: ‘Despite the well-documented effects of anger, fear, and anxiety on the ability to reason, many programs continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking.’ This suggests that a post-traumatised psyche, with its involuntary bent towards hyper-vigilance and anxious affect, is especially disadvantaged by any approach that simplistically applies cognitive reprogramming to a much more complex reality.

  Another aspect of my reticence regarding methodologies like those of Hay and Robbins relates to their emphasis on personal responsibility in controlling complex processes such as trauma that are largely operative at an unconscious level. Though Robbins distances himself from Hay in rejecting the cast of ‘positive thinking’, both avoid tackling the question of trauma directly and instead promote an individualistic responsibility over social and political responsibilities, and each of them, in their own way, promotes the idea that a given person is wholly liable for the conditions of their life. My concern is that people might assume the burden of failure if the desired changes and outcomes do not eventuate, compounding guilt and shame to the distress of traumatic symptomology.

  Alarm bells go off when I’m told there’s an instant cure for what ails me when I feel certain, intuitively and experientially, that the ailment is deeply rooted. Those alarm bells ring even louder when in the next breath I’m told that the cost of accessing this cure comes close to the down payment on a one-bedroom flat. This was my experience when I once attended a free Robbins event run by his underlings. The masculinist hype and evangelistic modus operandi had me hightailing it out the door, rattled, discomfited and suspicious about the claims of overnight transformation. I wrote him off as a charlatan, but now I wonder if it isn’t more complicated than that, if his shtick isn’t a way of keeping his own trauma at arm’s length via a perpetually performed, mood-altering high that also conveniently generates personal mega-wealth.

  In Berlinger’s documentary, which critic Mike D’Angelo savaged as ‘a glorified Tony Robbins commercial’ (Berlinger was apparently motivated to make the film after his own positive experience of a Date with Destiny event), Robbins makes his entrance for an e
xpertly pre-hyped crowd amid pulsing party music. He hollers and makes his signature air-punching, jazz-hands gesture, which true believers mirror back ecstatically. He reassures those who have gathered – people of all ages and races from all over the globe, serviced by a team of staff including translators – that the event is not just some ‘bullshit positive thinking seminar. I’m not going to tell you to start chanting there’s no weeds, there’s no weeds, there’s no weeds and hope shit isn’t there … We look for the weed and we rip it out.’ Those fighting words are followed by a self-effacing clarification: ‘I am not your guru.’ He didn’t come to fix what ain’t broke; he’s just there to guide you to your own mission to self-knowledge. He gets down to business, selecting individuals from the two-thousand-plus attendees to work with one on one in front of the entire audience.

  Robbins swears a lot, using what he calls ‘the science of taboo language’ because ‘words have the power to pierce the conscious mind; I’ll do whatever it takes to break the pattern, so you can reclaim you really are.’ But here’s the rub: a great number of those attracted to Robbins’ grand claims come from histories of severe or complex/chronic trauma. He doesn’t sell his method as a cure for trauma in so many words, but trauma is everywhere at his events: in the subtext, in the audience (extremely troubled and traumatised people are referred to as ‘red flag people’), and in Robbins himself. I’m particularly intrigued by an ‘intervention’ in which he asks people who are suicidal to stand. An attractive young woman is among those who have risen to their feet. Robbins makes a beeline for her and goes to work, teasing out the reason why someone with seemingly so much to live for might want to die.

  ‘No one really knows what’s inside me,’ she says. ‘I’m tired of having so much pain and carrying it for so many years.’ Robbins challenges her to stop stalling and spill the beans. Her story comes out in a cascade of running words and tears. She was born in the Children of God cult: ‘We had to be soldiers of God, and they believed that God’s love was sex.’ She goes on to describe a history of experiencing and witnessing abuse, winding up with the admission that her family is a mess, suicidal. She’s the ‘together’ one, she says, the ‘solution maker’, except she’s broken inside. She’s hit a wall and can’t do it anymore. And now here she is, surrounded by strangers, pouring it all out, red-nosed, grief gushing, and Robbins is right there, riveted, teary. He hugs her long and hard. ‘You’ve been trying to make sense of all this, but there’s no sense to it … You were in a position where you didn’t get to choose. Now you’re in a position where you get to choose. You take all the power back today.’ There’s a flash of hope in her eyes, then a veil of wariness. She had, we later learn, sold everything she owned to attend the seminar on the suggestion of a friend. Can she trust the words she’s hearing? Can she trust him? ‘Is she on the road to being healed, we wonder, or has she just exchanged one possible cult for another?’ asks film reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis. Writing on Berlinger’s film in The New York Times, Catsoulis soberly notes the ‘vampiric’ aspect of Robbins’ ‘public siphoning of hurt’.

  Afterwards, backstage, Berlinger interviews a still visibly emotional Robbins. Berlinger digs in, asking what happens for him in that moment in which he witnesses another’s pain at such close range. Robbins tears up: ‘I just felt her, felt for her,’ he says. He tries to describe his process when working with people in distress, talks about how it comes through him, how if people lead with love they’ll find a way and if they lead with fear they’ll fail and he will not fail someone that raw. He admits it’s the memory of his own suffering that makes him want to help others in theirs. Berlinger isn’t satisfied, probes deeper, points out that he himself suffered as a child but doesn’t have the ability to show up for a random attendee the way Robbins showed up for that young woman. Robbins cracks: ‘It’s my obsession (crying). It’s an obsession to break through, to help. I’m addicted to it. It makes me feel like my life has deep meaning, not just surface meaning. Everybody’s got their thing. This is my thing.’

  Bingo. In this moment we see that it’s not quite as straightforward as Robbins being, as he is oft charged, a con man swindling gullible people out of millions (though he is clearly profit driven and business savvy). I suspect Robbins genuinely believes in what he does in his ‘seminars’. He openly admits he’s driven to do it, thus exposing his own vulnerability and still-throbbing traumata. He may have built the motherfucker that is Tony Robbins, millionaire motivational speaker and life coach to the rich and famous, but the traumatised kid’s been with him every step of the way.

  The seminar closes with a meditation introduced by feel-good pop psychology hyperbole: ‘We brought our desire, our hunger, our love, our caring, and we left our fear, our limitations, our frustrations, and our fucking pasts behind. That’s what we did here, ladies and gentlemen.’ There’s something sad about the passion and force with which he says this and his own desperation to believe it. I know you can leave your past behind or I’d still be in a Darlinghurst bedsit injecting low-grade heroin, but I also know there is no absolute and compartmentalised ‘past’ when it comes to severe and chronic trauma.

  My sociologist friend, Dr Elaine Swan, who has researched therapy culture extensively, says Robbins ‘performs a classic charismatic self-help guru body and presence. He reproduces politically problematic psychological ideas. For me, he is the epitome of the US self-help psychologicalisation of the social. Of course, people do get a few tips from self-help. And some claim it helpful. Most respond to it as what Paul Lichterman calls “thin culture”, drawing on it along with other resources to try to get through whatever they need to. When people pay so much for a seminar, they tend to claim some road-to-Damascus experience.’ Another friend, Professor Zachary Steel, chair of trauma and mental health at the University of New South Wales, says that while he appreciates many of Robbins’ sentiments, he doesn’t believe PTSD can be treated as readily as his teachings imply.

  Despite my concerns and scepticism, I came away from the documentary curiously moved. No doubt, this is its intention and maybe it marks me a sucker. There’s something touching about the vulnerability of all those people searching, reaching, even Robbins himself. Something about the struggle of the human spirit and all that collective pain is compelling regardless of the questionability of the show-biz context and hyperbolic claims. At the end of the seminar, Robbins instructs the audience to reflect on three moments in their lives for which they are profoundly grateful and to feel the blessing of those moments. ‘Make your life a masterpiece,’ he says, by way of a goodbye. What, I’m left wondering, would he say to those who torture a kangaroo and post trophy footage of the unspeakable and avoidable suffering they inflict? How would he help the boys and men trading ‘wins’ in the pornography ring to make a ‘masterpiece’ of their lives?

  John Bradshaw, my favourite of the pop psychologists who came to prominence in the self-help heyday of the 1980s, was a philosophy-trained educator, counsellor and author, and a gifted, Southern preacher–inspired orator. Bradshaw was one of the few among that generation of grassroots gurus to avoid the ‘psychologicalisation of the social’ noted by Dr Swan, and to substantially ground his ‘recovery’ teachings in a socio-political context. Describing patriarchy as characterised by male domination and power, Bradshaw acknowledged the social constructionism of many of today’s ills, stating ‘patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school systems, and family systems’. bell hooks echoes Bradshaw: ‘Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.’ It’s not hard, then, to imagine how young men might think nothing of killing a wombat for kicks or posting a nudie of a girl from school with a ‘go get her boys’ invitation. It is only our routine minimising
of patriarchy’s daily realities and operations that gives rise to surprise when inevitable persecutions and barbarity transpire.

  I grew up in a less mediated time, one in which my childhood prerogatives, whims, experiments and insecurities were confined to the home, the neighbourhood, the schoolyard and the occasional party or group foray in the outside world. I had managed, in my first year of high school, to wheedle my way into the clique of popular kids in my grade, where teasing was relentless and rake-thin girls were called fat. I recall a constant feeling of unease, of niggling duplicity and fear. I dropped out of the clique voluntarily at the start of year eight, instead aligning myself with selected outcasts. Up until then I had identified with mainstream society, longed for my family to be more in step with it, looked to it for role models, and aspired to succeed in its image, but sometime during that second year I began to feel a sense of alienation, fused with a subliminal questioning of societal norms and values. Not only did it no longer seem important to be in with the puerile popular crowd, school itself no longer seemed important, or necessary. I spent much of that year in truancy, my growing boredom and disillusionment gradually incubating a determination to leave school altogether.