Theme Park at its Darkest

I had a nasty little incident in my share house last Sunday night.

One of my housemates (to cut a long story short) had a loud, drunken party that included a drunken, aggressive idiot. My other housemate asked him to turn the noise down so she could sleep and, as a result, all hell broke loose. It excited the drunken aggressive idiot and he then tried to provoke a fight with me in the kitchen.

I found this a highly traumatic experience. It occurred after I had returned from seeing Snowtown, a film concerned with male violence and the way it conditions social structures, so I was probably extra-distressed. Anyway, when I began to write a critique of Snowtown for my blog, it made me go back and look for a quote from the book Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.

Essentially, Dr Herman coined the term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ in relation to soldiers returned from war, but extended her discussion to include the presence of the disorder amongst women who had been victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse (rape and incest). It was suggested to me by a psychologist I went to see in my early twenties that I was manifesting the symptoms of the disorder as a result of my childhood (bull-goose loony father and boarding house experiences), as well as working as a bouncer.

The quote that always stuck in my head related to her use of the word ‘atrocity’. We generally hear it used in relation to war, but Herman also uses it in a domestic context. She says that an atrocity is something unspeakable; by speaking the name of the crime, you are effectively breaking the social compact.

Trying to find this quote got me googling, and I came across this page:

http://www.uic.edu/classes/psych/psych270/PTSD.htm

I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I assume it is a condensing of some of the salient ideas from the book. Although I read it maybe fifteen years ago, it amazed me how much of the text returned with the force of a revelation. In relation to the party-gone-awry last Sunday night, the thing that really struck me is that apparently, one of the things that distinguishes ‘survivor behaviour’ is ‘uncontrollable outbursts of anger and strict intolerance of rage in any form’. 

That sentence could be used to describe both my father and myself. I find I can control my anger much better now; otherwise there would have been a brawl last week-end.

One of the other things described in the linked article are the ‘features of highly resilient people’:
1. Alert, active temperament

2. Unusual sociability

3. Good communicating skills

4. Strong internal locus of control

and

GOOD LUCK

These things are also true of me, but strangely, not things I would have drawn on in a discussion of the subject.

Interesting.

When looking for an image, I found the following link:

http://ebooksfreedownload.org/2011/01/judith-herman-trauma-and-recovery-the-aftermath-of-violence-from-domestic-abuse-to-political-terror.html

The entire text of Trauma and Recovery can be downloaded there for free!

This entry was posted on May 30, 2011 at 10:47 am and is filed under Journalism, Reading with tags Judith Herman, Snowtown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.