“To beat that madman [Hitler], it’s not enough to survive World War II, you need to survive the war and still have your sense of humor.” –Stan Kelly-Bootle, author, Liverpool resident during the war
A reader of this blog wrote eloquently to me about how we process observations. Said he:
At some point, the observations we make, even the most carefully taken, the ones we have scrubbed free of bias, fit into narratives. That’s how we think. It’s how we build memories. It’s how we experience the world.
The stories children write are just series of and thens: “This happened and then that happened and then that happened—the end.” Those stories reflect the way the world works. This happens. Then that happens. That is objective reality. It is subjectivity that transforms this into meaning. We give our lives meaning by snapping the and thens into a narrative framework.
So while we are taking pains to observe the world in an unbiased way, it might also be profitable to examine our internal narrative-building mechanisms and see the extent to which we’re placing a thumb on life’s scale. In addition to accepting new ideas in a dispassionate, more rigorously objective way, we can also revise our stories to be more balanced.
In this Substack, I’ve discussed many times the importance of not fitting our observations to our preferred narratives. Those narratives cut both ways: reinforcing things we like and rejecting those we don’t.
A different and much deeper preferred narrative arises from traumatic experiences. In their simplest form, traumatic narratives manifest as anxiety—that is, a hypersensitivity to certain input and an excessive reaction to it when it occurs.
In this specific form, the stimulus is perceived as a threat based on an unhappy experience in which some aspect of the stimulus coincides with the original experience. For example, a particular sound or the sight of a person doing a certain thing can trigger anxiety—which is lived as a fight-or-flight impetus, most often in a situation in which neither fight nor flight is a fully realistic option. Hence the anxiety.
Decatastrophizing
Dispassionate observation cannot by itself overcome anxiety in the face of a stimulus. We know from modern insights into psychology that trauma is embedded in us far too deeply for us to address its effects through rational or emotional means. (For readers with interest in this, I recommend the landmark book The Body Keeps the Score as one of the best explanations.)
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