What is real is determined by past experiences
THE VEXED QUESTION: How do brutalised past experiences affect the real?
Dr Jeff Shanahan
Whenever I think about the vexed question of how our past experiences affect the way we process reality, I cannot help but shudder at the way victims like Aisha would see their “reality”.
You may recall the cover photo of the Time Magazine that so startled the world just one year ago. Aisha, the Afghanistan child bride was auctioned off by her indebted father to a Taliban warlord. Upon her desertion from her cruel and sadistic husband, she was promptly caught, and as a result her husband, in accordance to an old proverb, cut off her nose – perhaps to spite her, or his, face. Seriously though, how can we possibly begin to imagine the effect that this dramatic and sadistic experience had on her life? Does she think that every man with a beard is going to cut off her nose? Is she scared to venture out of the comfort of her home? Does she see the world as a cruel and sadistic place that has dealt her the joker?
Aisha’s example makes us reflect upon the role that past experiences have on who we are and how we view the world. Our past experiences consist of the interaction of many factors, such as our sensations, our gender, social restrictions, and our interaction with others.
But the question that keeps vexing me, is how do we cope with a troubled relationship with the past. What if our past has been brutalised to such an extent that it is threatening our grip on what is “real”?
Take Peta Barnes – a case closer to home. Like Aisha, she was the victim of her husband’s unstable and spiteful actions that have since deemed him to be a psychopath. Arthur Freeman tossed their daughter off the West Gate bridge like a Mayan and as a result, Ms Barnes is day by day attempting to build the bridge between herself and humanity. She states in her victim impact statement that ‘ I have the strength of character and resilience that helps me through the activities of day to day life’. However it is clear that the death has changed her reality for ever. She finds it difficult to trust people and every time she sees a strange little girl, she relives the trauma of her loss.
Perhaps, though, deep down she has the resilience to cope with her brutalised experiences that have irrevocably changed her present.
But what if the individual lacks the resilience or mental stability to cope?
It is a truism to state that we can never repeat or relive the past, so it is necessarily always recreated. According to psychoanalyst Peter Elling we recover the past through words – it is stored in “snatches of sentences and visual impressions recalled in words that only mimic reality”. So if this process of recovery mimics reality, then the past is possibly yet another story – sometimes fact, sometimes fiction.
Much depends upon how much brutality we can withstand.
Blanche’s fateful and repressed snatches of sentences “I know you disgust me’ encapsulate what she remembers of the past and how it influences her reality. This fragile and sensitive protagonist in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar named Desire, is forever affected by the loss of her young husband Alan. Her reality is forever changed by one fateful and gloomy experience and memory. Whilst coming into a room which she thought was ‘empty’, Blanche learns of Alan’s homosexual desires and as a result she deprecates him whilst dancing the Varsouviana. She is clearly too young and too shocked to cope with his act of betrayal. And yet because she is unable to fulfil the role of life-raft to her sinking husband, she forever feels responsible. She is overcome by grief and guilt and turns off the “light” as a sign of the trauma of her disgust and desire. Such desire is rekindled through her encounters with young boys, such as the young school boy, and the one collecting for the ‘Evening Star’. She tells him to “run along” because she has to ‘keep my hands off children’. It is as if these experiences conjure up that forbidden lost love object, which tantalised as much as disgusted her. No wonder she tries to keep such a self impenetrable from consciousness.
Likewise, Hamlet’s vivid memory of his father instils his anger at his mother’s ‘overhasty marriage’ and incites great brutality because of his repressed jealousy and feelings of betrayal. Hamlet grants his father god like features ‘the front of Jove, Hyperion’s curls’ whereas her new husband is compared akin to a ‘mildewed ear’. It is evident that Hamlet’s vivid memory and love for his father, plagues his version of reality.
This brings me to the next part of my vexation concerning brutalised experiences. Although they influence the real in ambivalent ways. Interestingly, the memories that Blanche recalls about her troubled past are those she seems most intent on forgetting. Freud claims that traumatic experiences are often repressed in the subconscious but lurk beneath the surface and are often recalled during troublesome times. We have a ‘compulsion to repeat’ which refers to the process of remembering or recalling aspects of our trauma which surface in distorted ways and interferes with our current day realities.
Ironically, Blanche suppresses her trauma relating to her past experiences to such an extent that it bears little resemblance to the “real”. Her fanciful and selective process of distortion leads to schism. Blanche creates the Cinderella-type myth so as to cope with her shame and her contradictory attitude towards disgust and desire.
She fills her wardrobe with beautiful dresses, sprinkles herself with perfume, bathes herself in glory, turns off the light and waits for the Texas billionaire, Shep Huntleigh, to rescue her. Sadly, such schism cannot shield her forever, and the trauma blunts the “reality”. Blanche’s brutal past comes back to haunt her in far worse ways than she could ever have imagined. The ‘date’ with Stanley fulfils his animalistic tendencies and reaffirms his authority, but it exposes Blanche’s illusions and dooms her to a schizoid life lived in an asylum. Here we can see that often a person’s memory or experience of an event can foster their illusions, which in turn foster their realities.
Many people, especially children, who have experienced natural disasters also register similar split personalities because of their inability to deal with their trauma. As a result, fear dominates the horizon and the “real” becomes increasingly dislocated. For example, Matthew was nine years old when he was trying to save his friend’s house during the Black Saturday fires. He was traumatised upon returning to his own burnt house and the realisation of the death of his neighbour and grandparents. Ever since, bright red sunsets, fierce winds, and the mists in the morning trigger memories of the fire and lead to phobic reactions and panic attacks. He has frequent nightmares and at times is unable to breathe. As renowned holocaust psychiatrist Paul Valent says both adults and children “don’t join the dots [over emotional problems causing the physical symptoms] because behind that lies thoughts like ‘Life has no meaning because I didn’t save so-and-so’ or ‘because I killed so-and-so’. He states that the problem leads to disconnection that threatens their wholeness. “But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you will kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole anymore.”
The challenge for such individuals like Aisha, Peta, Matthew and Blanche is to find a way to become “loving and creative” once again so that the “real” becomes once again a habitable place, rather than a burnt out tragedy. When Matthew finally releases the white balloons over the graveyard of his neighbour he starts to work through his trauma – his angst, his regret, his fear and failures.
Perhaps it is in people like Matthew that we can see the most hopeful signs of how to cope with a brutalised past that has interfered so cruelly with what has become all too real.
His mother states that after releasing his negative, pent up emotions he “just picked up overnight. I noticed he started to laugh more and enjoy things more. The biggest change was when he was faced with information about the fire, or people were talking about what happened to them. He is now able to hear it without it affecting him.”
Surely, there can be no clearer indication of how to deal with a brutalised past that has derailed the processing of the “real”.