Arrested psychosocial development
When a traumatic experience occurs at a critical stage of a person's development, it tends to stop completion of that stage. Thus, we have the term, "adult children"- physically grown adults exhibiting infantile/childish behaviors, while we assume that this is simply "human nature:" withdrawing from relationships without explanation, conducting secret, hurtful affairs, creating old, dysfunctional family-of-origin behaviors in professional settings"
The United States is frequently referred to as a "teenager" (or younger). Governments appear to enact temper tantrums; multinational corporations (and politicians) find it impossible to allow themselves to admit wrongdoing; many corporations appear to take a perverse delight in assaulting the Earth. A prime example of this lack of maturity is maintaining nuclear arsenals that can destroy our world many times over.
Addiction/Compulsion
Addiction is often an attempt to avoid confronting the pain that lies at the heart of traumatic experience. Its hallmark is an out-of-control, often aimless, compulsion to fill a lost sense of belonging, integrity and communion - with substances like alcohol and drugs, and activities like overworking, gambling, and compulsively falling in love (or lust). Note also the constant increase in military budgets and the development of powerful, super-secret weapons of mass destruction and manipulation, such as psychotronics.
As Morris Berman states:
"Dependence on alcohol, tobacco etc. is not [essentially] different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more [effective] bombs. Or the need to exercise control over everything."
These dreadful compulsions are shielded from awareness by denial: pretending everything is normal, not admitting pain or vulnerability, holding up appearances to others at all costs.
Yet another characteristic of addiction is an attraction to repeated trauma
This is called the completion compulsion. The traumatized person unconsciously infuses his reality with emotional content of the traumatizing event, relentlessly reenacting the themes of trauma in order to offer himself the opportunity to achieve the longed-for resolution. The problem is that this strategy is very seldom successful; it frequently does not aid the healing process and may become an obsession.
We are natural beings, like all others. When our place within these embedded systems feels unhinged, stressful, or traumatic, our body-mind system attempts to create healing and balance. Self-medication - alcohol, cocaine, or shopping and sex - arises as a vain attempt to rebalance ourselves.
We don't know how to escape from our social co-dependency, so the mind attempts to numb the pain. The 'anti-social' radical, the anarchist, or the crazy artist, are also often attempting to create equilibrium in the midst of systemic dysfunction.
Chellis Glenndining writes:
"Although modest and physically challenging, primal life offered benefits and shaped our nature. Early humans, like all animals, matured in stable communities with relatively secure food supplies. For millennia, families remained intact and children grew up watching parents work, surrounded by nature - the ultimate parent - learning lessons from the wilderness and from all creatures.
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