"Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman, MD
And the bigotry and sexism therein.
Dr. Judith Herman, in her book Trauma and Recovery, which I am perusing for a case I am working on, says in chapter one: “When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable.”
Men experience this invalidation at a more pronounced reality than women do, in my experience. Men are told to “man up”, or to “walk it off” or “don’t cry” and especially “don’t show weakness”. Women are not held to this standard.
If there was a voice that needs to be heard, that needs to be validated, and which is already devalued, it is the voice, the cry, the anguish of a man that has lived a life of trauma.
HIS experience becomes unspeakable…
Fuck that. Men deserve to be heard, to be acknowledged as having pain and traumatic responses, and to be allowed to receive help, validation, and experience healing and recovery.
Another quote, which I often use from Trauma and Recovery, is this gem: “If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.”
This statement is immediately followed by: “Women who have sought justic in the legal system commonly compare this experience to being raped a second time.”
Men don’t suffer injustice in the legal system y’unnerstand. They don’t get PTSD from court, nor have they ever been raped… Oh wait…
To limit this devaluing of an individual as applicable to only women and children is sexist, bigoted, and this limitation is a logical fallacy. While she does cover some instances in the book that relate to men, such as warfare, the book does nothing to balance the equation of how much trauma actually affects men to a larger degree than the main audience of the book. (Nor is the book intended to do so.)
Men are told to shut the fuck up by society, and this book basically mirrors this perspective. For a segment of the population (feminists and the women’s liberation movement) that abhors “toxic masculinity”, Dr. Herman has surely embraced and perpetuated what they refer to as “toxic masculinity” in her categorizations of women and children as the primary victims of trauma. The mentions of men seem to be foundationally restricted in the book to the discussion of the development of PTSD as a recognized syndrome, to which Dr. Herman colloquializes as “THE COMBAT NEUROSIS OF THE SEX WAR”, combining this into sexual trauma and violence, which she seems to exclusively allow to women. The sad fact is that men and boys also experience these horrors and societal frameworks tell them to not discuss it (invalidation/devaluation).
It’s just ironic that she uses the trauma of men in war to establish how the origination and mainstream source of PTSD is now also gender-appropriated to also affect women, while inferring that men are only affected by trauma if they are affected by combat in war, as originally presented in psychological frameworks. So, women can appropriate PTSD and trauma responses to things other than war, but men cannot?
Dr. Herman does admit: “THIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE to the women’s liberation movement. Its intellectual mainspring is a collective feminist project of reinventing the basic concepts of normal development and abnormal psychology, in both men and women.”
The feminism and women’s liberation of Trauma and Recovery gender-appropriates the pain of men to allude that the trauma that men first brought to light with combat-related PTSD, is now appropriated to women to a more deserving degree. Very liberating indeed… except for the foundational facts of origin and gender-appropriation.
To demonstrate her position on this, I offer: “There is war between the sexes. Rape victims, battered women, and sexually abused children are its casualties. Hysteria is the combat neurosis of the sex war.” Do you see any mention of men in this statement? I don’t. Yet, the women and children are now appropriated as war veterans with this statement, while excluding men from mentions of this same horror that is documented everywhere else but this book.
Here’s a perfectly gender-neutral statement, if only Dr. Herman hadn’t relegated this to women only: “The traumatized person may experience intense emotion but without clear memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. She may find herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why.”
I do agree with this quote: “Traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized.”
While I choose to believe that there is always a choice to resist or escape, even if only mentally, some cannot readily subscribe to that paradigm. As seasoned as I am, fatigue and doubt sometimes grab me by the throat for moments that linger. I guess that means that sometimes, I can’t “man up” or “walk it off”. Eventually though, at least so far, I’ve always circled back around to looking for options. Maybe one day I’ll be the one to say there’s no way out. I hold no hubris that claims to be all powerful or alleging that I can overcome every obstacle.
I appreciate Dr. Herman diving into and documenting the nature of trauma. I despise her limitations of this phenomena to primarily women and children, with only a nod to the veterans of the combat of war. I especially despise the feminist ideology and women’s “liberation” that equates to only appropriating what men originated.
P.D., JAY V. SHORE, as Certified ADA Advocate.
P.S. - This was finished at 5:58 am, after being up all night working on letters for ADA clients. It may be a rambling bunch of incoherent babble, but I had to put it out.