The PTSD Party

I was busy last night leaving snips of rage and erudition at various places around the ‘net. The topic is important enough that it deserves some more attention. I touched on it at Fertile Ground. It is the relationship of PTSD to politics. All I can telly you from a personal perspective is that if you are in the 90% that haven’t had severe PTSD (longer than a year) or are among the 80% who can never get it (it is in part genetic) you have no idea. None. I have touched on my own contact with the “problem” from time to time but you will have to root around to see if you can find it. I’m not going looking nor will I provide a recap. Let me just say that through intense personal efforts (beyond the capability of most – I had to take 5 years out of my life – on the road so to speak) I was able to fix it. Mostly.

But since most people have no intimate contact with PTSD I thought it might be good to delve further into its influence on politics. Thus my efforts in the comments at various blogs last night. So let me start:

Revolutionaries and outlaws have a thing in common.

They tend to be abused children.

They have in common a grievance against a civilization that failed to protect them. A source of infinite discontent. Because once traumatized the trauma lives on in persons with PTSD (to varying degrees) for life.

Do you want to do something about politics AND crime? Do something about PTSD. Did I say crime? Yes. Because the rage comes out in anti-social acts. You can get a rather good education on the subject by looking at the wanted posters in any American Post Office. In about 1/2 the pictures the beatings, rapes, and who knows what else clearly shows in the faces of the perps.

There is a political party that caters to PTSD sufferers (drug users, the sexually ambivalent, the sexual deviant etc. ) the Democrat Party. Now I don’t object to any of those behaviors from a principled stand point. They are adaptations.

What I do object to is that the Right is doing exactly zero to dry up the wellspring of its opposition. Child abuse.

Oh. The Right is perfectly happy to fight the symptoms. With negative results (how will the traumatized react to further trauma?). But dry up the well? Not even under the dimmest of consideration.

So there you have it. The Democrats are powered by grievance and those with the strongest grievances tend to rise to the top. This is especially true in the “feminist” political industry. The system promulgated by them is exactly what you would expect from women who have been sexually molested and who there by have acquired life long PTSD. The difficulty is that the “rules” are good for those who have been molested or raped but counter productive for those who have not encountered a rapist (usually a family member) or or a molester (almost always a family member).

Funny thing is: I just asked the First Mate “which Party is the PTSD Party?” Now she is not an avid reader of my blogging so she is not up to date with my writing on the subject. So she didn’t have a crib sheet so to speak. She chimed up at once, “The Democrats.”

So there you have it: my prescription for dealing the left a death blow. Greatly reduce the incidence of child abuse in America. Dry up the well. Because you will never defeat people with such ingrained rage with politics. Now it might be possible to pacify them with drugs if drugs were legal. But the Republicans in all their towering stupidity continue with their insane war on drugs. It is almost as if they didn’t understand the problem. They don’t. They treat the PTSD Party as if it was full of normal rational people. But people with PTSD are not “normal” or rational. They can not be reasoned with. When my PTSD was full blown you could not reason with me. So I’m fully aware of the situation.

The Republicans (as I pointed out above) do tend to see the irrationality of such people. But do they dry up the well? No. They make laws against symptoms. Like that is going to work. Like it is not going to provoke a backlash. Idiots.

And I’m not proposing laws. Education about the subject should do the trick. Not perfectly, but well enough.

So let me explain it in the simplest terms:

You can not beat PTSD with politics

To even try is IMO a fools errand.

Update 21 Feb 2012 2013z

I was discussing this with one of my Republican friends by e-mail and he wasn’t getting it. As I predicted up thread. [All I can telly you from a personal perspective is that if you are in the 90% that haven’t had severe PTSD (longer than a year) or are among the 80% who can never get it (it is in part genetic) you have no idea. None.] So here is a BIG CLUE:

Bill Clinton “feels your pain.”


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

12 responses to “The PTSD Party”

  1. Eric Avatar

    Great post! You inspired me to do a little research.

  2. […] Simon had a rather brilliant post about PTSD the other day, and rather than leave a comment I thought a new post was in […]

  3. […] The PTSD Party. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]

  4. Conniption Fitz Avatar
    Conniption Fitz

    PTSD is the consequence of sin, experienced, committed, and observed.

    Sin is harm or trauma whether done to us or by us…or whether we simply witness it or even if it is covered up or we are told it is not sin.

    Sin/trauma is an intense ‘conditioning stimulus’ that alters human emotional/physical/relational responses.

    Sin/trauma depending on its intensity, duration, and frequency, causes PTSD syndrome response, psychopathology, shame, guilt, conflict, dissonance, illogic and confusion of thought, diminished judgment, diminished, distorted or altered or complete loss attachment to truth, reason and reality, increased fear, terror responses.

    Some of these sin/trauma stimuli can be less intense such as poor modeling, deception, betrayal, adultery, disunity, conflict, disrespect, contempt in the relationship of one’s parents or toward the child.

    More intense negative conditioning would occur in incest, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, divorce, death and abandonment, mental illness of one or both parents.

    A person who witnesses horror, such as the terrorist attack on the WTC will exhibit an array of trauma symptoms, depending on their own vulnerability and pre-conditioning.

    A child who frequently witnesses his parents violently abusing another can internalize this as a lesson and experience a diminished regard for the value of human life and lose empathy for the pain of others, thus can become a sociopath.

    Restoration and healing require re-learning our responses and is a difficult long-term process that requires professional help and strong loving support as well as the power of God to achieve.

    Biblical principles/precepts/laws work best whether they were/are Christian, Jewish, Socratic, Platonic or secular.

    That is why faith-based drug treatment centers work best.
    That is why abstinence and self/other/human life respect engendering (not esteem, but respect) programs that teach self-control work best.

  5. Conniption Fitz Avatar
    Conniption Fitz

    And you are SO Right – PTSD is a common factor among the leaders and creators of historical atrocity and evil on this earth.

    Fatherlessness and parental abuse damages a child’s humanity, thus creates sociopathic ideology fueled monsters.

    That is the message of the book of Malachi. That is why God spoke the last words in that book, Malachi 4:4-6.

    After that, God did not speak to Israel again for 430 years, when His messengers announced the birth of the Messiah…the perfect model, lesson of how to be a man/father/son/parent, of commitment, and sacrificial love.

  6. […] wrote The PTSD Party a while back and today in conjunction with this Breitbart video it got me to thinking. Why did Bill […]

  7. Conniption Fitz Avatar
    Conniption Fitz

    Further thoughts on your most intriguing premise:

    When a child is abused, or even mis-taught or reared in an atmosphere where truth, love, respect for life, are not valued, taught, modeled, the child’s inner compass is disoriented and their beliefs distorted. This creates inner conflict, chaos, loss of direction…lawlessness. I John 3:4 – Sin is lawlessness. That child may develop anxiety and fearfulness or anger/rage and aggression or alternatively express those. This will damage the child’s ability to mature, develop cognitively, emotionally and relationally.

    Fatherlessness (through abandonment, addiction, abuse) is one of the leading predictors of imprisonment…the consequence of lawlessness. Fatherlessness is also one of the common factors in the shaping of a despot/dictator/revolutionary/radical. A Hitler or a Stalin, a Van Gogh or a Mozart or recreated into a John Newton, a Wilberforce, a Churchill. A Clinton, an Obama, a Romney or recreated by the grace of God into a Newt Gingrich or a Rick Santorum. With God’s help, sin disorientation and distortion fostered by abuse does not have to be the victor.

  8. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Fitz,

    If you think of “addiction” as taking pain relievers to relieve pain it becomes a lot less sinister.

    As to the rest – yes – if we dealt with PTSD effectively we would have a lot less crime.

    Dude: Jesus is not going to fix this. Men are going to have to change their laws. And the first thing that needs to be done is to end the war on the traumatized. End drug prohibition. Now!

  9. jane Avatar
    jane

    You wrote a very insightful article, except for the part where you suggest drugs should be legalized to “pacify” these people. You don’t know any real progressives, do you? THEY ARE ALREADY ON DRUGS!!

    Marijuana is so ubiquitous in progressive circles that there’s no need to “legalize” it if *access* is your concern. Not only are they already smoking pot liberally, but doing other drugs too…like oxycontin.

    Either way, drugs will NOT solve this problem. It makes it worse. Everyone I know who smokes pot regularly is at an arrested state of emotional development. It keeps them at a toddler-level of emotional maturity. This is one of the reasons *why* they want entitlements – they are children emotionally!

    Pot also does not allow people to heal from their emotional wounds – it just numbs them.

    The real problem is the psychiatric establishment that chooses to push more drugs as the “solution” rather than really healing people. Churches might be able to help if they stopped getting all political and distracted over issues like homosexuality and actually went out into the inner cities and reached out to kids in need.

  10. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    jane,

    What you describe sounds a LOT like PTSD.

    Our politics would be a LOT saner if drugs were a medical and not a legal issue.

    In any case prohibition is about over. About 50% of adult Americans favor legalizing pot. Legalization will be on the ballot in Wash., Colorado, and Mass.

  11. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Further, in medicine the general rule is: if you can’t cure at least you can keep the patient comfortable.

    There is no cure for PTSD except time. And for some there will not be enough time. We should keep such people comfortable and yes – numb. Why numb? Well it keeps them from hurting others.

    You might want to see how PTSD affects veterans. And how many veterans are calling for legalization.

    http://www.veteransformedicalmarijuana.org/content/ptsd

    Of course we want the Vets to get help. Now how about victims of child abuse and sexual assaults on children? Are they any less deserving?

    And if you are up for it you might want to look at how sexual assaults in childhood affect women.

    http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2004/09/heroin.html

  12. Junk Male Avatar
    Junk Male

    I am a PTSD lifer of over 50 years duration. Neither drugs nor therapy help me. Jesus helped for about 3½ years; then He vanished and left me to my invisible tormentors.

    I have so much bottled up anger from events surrounding puberty that I will die with it, and not much else. My primary mental image of my Dad is his face red with rage as he whipped me with a leather belt. He beat that rage into me as a child, and it became mine for life.

    Anger has been my ruin and my invisible, crippling disability. I was booted out of Officer’s Candidate School two or three weeks before commissioning, with “Reason for Dismissal: M.A.D.” – then sent to Vietnam, serving as a latrine cleaner until my service obligation was up. I spent most of the next 40+ years of my life unemployed or severely unemployed, I think because of the volatile hostility writ large on my face. I never married or had children, for lack of a steady income, although my undisguised anger probably was more directly responsible for my being isolated from people as well. Without insurance (although insurance probably wouldn’t cover it, either), I’m unable to get the expensive surgery (not available in the U.S.) to repair the cause of chronic pain that has rendered me intermittently disabled for at least 20 years or more. In the absence of a flexible employer who could allow me to work around the pain, part-time, at times when I’m not in pain, I’ve only had 15 months of professional employment in the past 35 years.

    It all goes back to the anger beaten into me as a child for misbehavior. Madness has kept me behind a thick glass, with “Life” on the other side of the glass, unreachable, but painfully obvious as to what it could have been. Even with all the meds I do take, I know there is no fixing this condition, and all there is to my life is looking forward to being delivered from it, to go to be with Jesus.