Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hi, I'm Kim Neely and this is the Trauma Informed slp. It is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves. I think I said empowerment. Okay. Did empowerment come out okay? I feel like I said it kind of weird. Anyway,
Speaker 0 00:00:21 And just so you know, most of what I am telling you is coming from the book called Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman. She gave a great history of research and treatment of trauma in western medicine. And so that's where we're starting with. And I did reference a few other articles that I will include in references in the show notes. But a lot of the quotes that I'm including come from Hermann's book Trauma and Recovery, which I might have occasionally called it Heller, which is not what I meant. Heller is another very prominent trauma author, <laugh>, but that's not the book I meant. I meant Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Hermann. That's what I'm going on here. Okay. As usual, I do wanna put in a little bit of a trigger warning for this, even though this is a story that I'm telling you, I am gonna make reference to sexual abuse. Not anything in any detail, but just so you know, sexual abuse, but also people calling the victims of such effectively liars and things like that. So just trigger warning on that. As always, if you feel too much discomfort, please do pause and just take care of yourself, regulate, do what you need to do to calm your body. Definitely don't want any kind of retraumatization from listening to my podcast.
Speaker 0 00:01:42 I also wanted to include a little disclaimer for my non-binary friends out there and any trans people listening when I say men and women in this storyline. Really what I want my listeners to hear is women are people who are socialized as women regardless of how they felt about their gender internally. And the men were people who were socialized as men usually regardless of how they might have identified internally. Okay? When we look at history, a lot of times we kind of think of the fluid gender spectrum as being a recent thing, but in all actuality, these people do exist. And they did exist throughout history in all areas. It just wasn't socially acknowledged as such. And so history records pretty much what people saw. So just so you know, when you hear me say men and women on this, I'm referring to people who are socialized as male and people who are socialized as female. Okay? Throughout this story,
Speaker 0 00:02:42 Welcome to the start of medical dehumanization issues. Ha ha, how exciting and how fun. But today, instead of making it kind of more of a lecture-based thing and having my outline and my points and my recaps, I wanna tell you a story. I want to tell you the story of the history of trauma treatment and awareness in western medicine. So take a moment listeners and think, when you think of the history of trauma, what do you tend to think of? For most of us, like for myself, before I learned about this particular history I'm about to go through with you, I thought about military, right? World War I needing to treat the shell shock. That's what I thought of. Turns out that is actually not the start of the study of trauma. It did not start with military. We'll get to why military is what comes into our mind, but it actually started with Freud, Sigmund Freud. What did Sigmund Freud? You mean the penis envy guy? Yes. I do mean the penis envy guy. And this story also really helped me to kind of understand a little more of what the heck was going on with Freud, but I don't wanna spoil too much. So we're just gonna take this little ride. Join me as we visit late 19th century France. Ah, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:04:09 Back in the days of the late 19th century, the days of female hysteria. You guys remember what that is? Have you heard of that? Female hysteria? This is that thing that went right along with like the wandering uterus and all that, right? Where like women are just crazy. Sometimes female hysteria developed into a somewhat serious area of study for a brief moment in time in the late 19th century. And a lot of that started with Jean Martin Charco. I think I said that right? It looks like Charcot, but I know it's French. So think it's Charco. He was a French neurologist in the late 19th century and he's considered the patriarch of the study of hysteria. Okay? So prior to this, hysterical, women were considered to be malingers. Meaning they were doing it for attention, right? It was all in their heads, right? It was a condition that was outside of serious scientific study.
Speaker 0 00:05:10 But Charco, being a French neurologist and really into physiology, he wanted to taxonomize hysteria. He wanted to list off all the physiological symptoms and the signs he wanted to get down to the physiological reason, essentially behind hysteria. Okay? So according to Wikipedia, female hysteria, it was a common diagnosis for women. It had a wide array of symptoms. So anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, uh, heaviness in the abdomen. I'm not exactly sure how that differs from fluid retention, but irritability, loss of appetite for food, sexually forward behavior, and a tendency to cause trouble for others. I kind of love that last one. Like how broad could you get a tendency to cause trouble for others, right? Like, what does that mean? Like basically you wanna lock up this female and in an insane asylum and the intake person is just like, so what are the symptoms?
Speaker 0 00:06:13 And I guess the man who's probably doing this just has to say she's causing trouble for all of us. And it's like, oh, yep, check the box. That's it. Lock her up. Uh, also, I mean, uh, it so connects to like modern day rhetoric too, where it's like these people are troublesome. That's set. They don't deserve to be treated with any kind of justice or respect or anything like that, right? Okay. Anyway, that's a side note. <laugh>. Anyway, but yeah, those were the symptoms of hysteria that you just had to meet in order to be locked away in a hospital like the one where Charco did his experiments. And prior to Charco, it was not considered a serious study. But Charco is like really into physiology. Okay guys, he wants to figure out the physiological symptoms and the science. He wants to get at the root of the physiological cause that women are having this hysteria.
Speaker 0 00:07:12 Okay? So he performed experiments at this really big hospital. I'm going to butcher it pronunciation wise, but uh, Sal, Sal, oh my gosh, I don't know guys. Anyway, it's this really big hospital that treated beggars and prostitutes and they also had the insane of Paris who were locked up there. The main key to remember about this hospital is the beggars. Prostitutes, like the lower class people were usually put there, okay? But this is where Charco did a lot of his experiments. He called this hysteria the great neurosis, okay? And he wanted to focus on the symptoms that really resembled neurological damage cuz he's a neurologist, right? So he focused on motor paralysis, sensory loss, any sort of convulsions they're having, any amnesia they might be having, right? And he would give these Tuesday lectures. So this would involve high society people, authors, doctors, actors, actresses, like probably some of the wealthy aristocrats and such, coming to this hospital and watching him perform live demonstrations of hysteria from the women he was treating.
Speaker 0 00:08:31 So essentially they pull a woman out into this room, into this lecture space and they kind of poke and prod her to elicit reactions, hysterical reactions in them so that the audience could witness the symptoms and then learn about whatever charco happened to, want to tell them about what he's discovered about these symptoms. Okay? He did this a a lot by putting the women in a hypnotic trance. And then he wanted to demonstrate hysterical attacks when they were in this trance. Okay? So I'm gonna read through the excerpt that Herman included in her book and trauma recovery. This was an account of one of his Tuesday lectures where a young woman in a hypnotic trance was being used to demonstrate a convulsive hysterical attack, convulsive, almost like seizure-Like essentially that's the behavior they felt they were seeing with these women when they would do this.
Speaker 0 00:09:28 So this woman's in this trance or in some kind of semiconscious state, okay? And Charco says, let us press again on the hyster point. The note says a male intern touches the patient in the ovarian region. Charco says, here we go again. Occasionally subjects even bite their tongues, but this would be rare. Look at the arched back, which is so well described in textbooks. The patient calls out, mother, I am frightened, charco says, note to the emotional outburst, if we let things go unabated, we will soon return to the epileptic behavior. A side note says the patient cries again. Oh, mother Charco says again, note these screams. You could say it's a lot of noise over nothing. So this is modern day feminist Kim stepping in here, but um, a lot of noise over. Nothing really, really, my guy, like that's what you're going with.
Speaker 0 00:10:24 I don't know man. If it was me and I was in a room full of a bunch of strangers, likely wealthier than I ever was in my life being put in some sort of trance or semi-conscious state basically, and then poked and prodded by strange dudes in my lower abdomen, I probably would be vocalizing as well. I don't think it's a lot of vocalizations over nothing. You know, I don't know. I feel like Charco maybe should have put himself in that position and seen if it really was vocalizations over nothing. I would love to have seen him go through the exact same thing. Like honestly my dude, come on. I take some pretty big issue with your interpretation of the data. You know what I'm saying? So Charco is doing his utmost best to be incredibly objective here, right? He talks about the subjects as subjects.
Speaker 0 00:11:14 He talked about his, their speech as vocalizations or outbursts. He didn't really care about the words they have to say cuz he was just looking at the physical signs of their attacks, right? And what was happening with this, it doesn't sound very nice. I would not have liked to have been a low class woman in Paris locked away in a hospital being poked and prodded at a public lecture in front of a bunch of rich people. But that's what he did. And he did it to get attention and to show that he was being scientific with the study to show that it was a something worth serious scientific study. Cuz remember, remember prior to this female hysteria was considered malingering. It was considered just a manipulation of the people around the women. And it wasn't considered something worthy of serious scientific study because everybody just assumed they knew what was up, right?
Speaker 0 00:12:14 So that's why he did these public lectures. That was his point, was to get the word out that, look, these are real physical symptoms and look, we can take a real scientific look at these symptoms and possibly discover something about female hill hysteria rather than just going on the assumption that it's always malingering. What ended up happening is charoo determined that it was in their head at least psychologically. So I guess he started thinking more along the lines of what we would call psychosomatic, where it's like the symptoms are showing up in the body, but it's actually just coming from a psychological state that somebody's in. He figured this because the symptoms were replicable basically when they were in this hypnotic trance, when they were in this semi-conscious state, that is when they would show the convulsions and these physical symptoms. So instead of it being neur neurological in terms of the way he understood neurology and physiology, he felt it was all in their head and it was psychological. So of course this brings a lot of interest in the emerging field of psychology at the time. So a lot of interest from the founding fathers of psychology, they got really interested in this and wanted to study it.
Speaker 0 00:13:32 So now enters Pierre Janay, William James, and Sigmund Freud. Okay? These are physicians who made a pilgrimage to Charco because they wanted to study hysteria under him. And when Charco decided, this is clearly a psychological thing that got Janae and Freud really interested as the kind of early pioneers in the interest of psychology. So there was a bit of a rivalry between Janae and Freud. They each wanted to be the first one to make the great discovery of what causes female hysteria psychologically. Like what is the psychological basis for this hysteria? Okay? So what they found is that it was necessary to actually start talking to the women revolutionary research method. I know <laugh>, little bit sarcasm for you there. Revolutionary men talking to women to actually hear about what they're going through. Man, crazy. So the way Judith Herman says this in her book, trauma and Recovery is that for a brief decade, men of science listened to women with a devotion and respect unparalleled before or since. And honestly it's kind of sad that it hasn't been paralleled since, and it was only a decade.
Speaker 0 00:14:53 So what they did, Jana and Freud both had daily meetings with hysterical patients. These meetings usually lasted for hours. Um, the, they basically wrote down the case study of everything that the patients were saying, and it, most of the case study, she says, read more like collaborations between doctor and patient. More like open conversation essentially. Okay? So what happened is by the mid 1890s, sone is working in France and Freud with his collaborator, SF Broyer and Vienna, they arrived independently at similar hypotheses of where hysteria was coming. Both groups, the Vienna and the Jene and Paris Group discovered that hysteria was a condition caused by psychological trauma that the hysteria were unbearable emotional reactions to traumatic events produced in an altered state of consciousness, which in turn induced hysterical symptoms. Okay? Jenay is the one who called this alteration dissociation, which is a term we still use for when we have that disconnect between our mid-brain and our prefrontal cortex and Boyer and Freud called it double consciousness.
Speaker 0 00:16:06 Okay? I found that so startling when I learned about that. I mean, they both arrived independently at that hypothesis of this was caused by psychological trauma in the women. And they both got to that hypothesis from sitting around and actually listening to the women, listening to the women tell them their stories of what happened to them. Kind of amazing, right? That just the act of sitting and listening actually got them to, I guess it's a little spoil alert, but got them to the actual root of what was going on. But now that they figured out what the root cause was, now it came time to figure out why was it in the women, right? Why are men not showing hysteria? What is it that make the women unique? Nick?
Speaker 0 00:16:55 So Janay thought that because the women could be induced to hypnosis that their dissociation or their hypnotic trances was a sign of psychological weakness and suggestibility. Okay? But Boyer and Freud actually thought that hysteria could be found among people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character, and highest critical power. Okay? So Judea is like, well, the reason they're having this hysteria is because they were suggestive and weak. And Boyer and Freud are like, no, no, no, this isn't suggestive in weak. They're having this reaction due to how bad the trauma was, basically. Does that make sense? That's kind of what they're getting at. They're not saying it in quite that many words, but they both recognize that those symptoms that Charco was seeing were representations of really intensely distressing events. So they're, they're having a reliving of a really des distressing event, okay? And they also found that the women could have some relief from their hysterical symptoms when those traumatic memories they had were recovered and put into words, okay?
Speaker 0 00:18:05 Which is the basis of how they came up with psychotherapy, with talk therapy, you know what I mean? So this is where essentially Freud and sine both came up with that idea, <laugh>, of let's talk through things with people and put it into words, and now they feel a little better about it, okay? But now the question that pops into my mind is, why did Janae think it was due to the susceptibility and the weakness, the weak mindedness of women? And Freud saw it as perhaps the severity of the trauma and that it could incur in highly intelligent people, right? So what did these men find? Freud particularly, he kind of followed the thread of memory back the furthest and started to explore the sexual lives of the women. Shouldn't be too surprising since we're talking about Freud, but still he went into that area because of the recall these women were having, because of the memories they were talking about.
Speaker 0 00:19:01 You know, the idea of it being related to sexual intercourse or sexual neurosis was not in his mind at first. He sort of thought of it as like, if hysteria relates to sex, that it's actually kind of an insult to the women, right? And the women also saw that too because I mean, you know, sexy times at the time was more like, you know, it's all private, right? Little too controversial to bring it into the public sphere. You keep it all behind closed doors and you keep it all behind closed mouths. Yeah, I'm gonna leave that analogy there. That could get off the rails really fast. So I love how Hermann says this, where she's talking about Freud's empathy toward these women and his early writings on hysteria. And she says his case histories reveal a man possessive, such passionate curiosity that he was willing to overcome his own defensiveness and willing to listen.
Speaker 0 00:19:52 What he heard was appalling repeatedly, his patients told him of sexual assault, abuse, and incest. But I just love her acknowledgement of his willingness to listen to these women, regardless of how appalling those messages are. You know? And from a trauma-informed perspective, it's an incredibly trauma informed thing to be willing to set aside your biases and your assumptions and your presumptions and your stereotypes about people and sit and listen to these stories and to make space to sit and listen even when the things you're being told are emotionally incredibly challenging and honestly sometimes rather horrific to listen to, you know? So Freud, in NI 1896, he put Ford a report called The Etiology of Hysteria. It was a report on 18 case studies, and he made a very dramatic claim, but he believed he found the actual source of the hysterical symptoms. The quote from his own etiology of hysteria is, I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria, there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience occurrences, which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be re reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades.
Speaker 0 00:21:17 Yeah, he actually put it in writing folks, Freud put it in writing that female hysteria was from sexual abuse, basically cases of molestation and sexual abuse, rape, okay? Heller continues to say, a century leader, this paper still rivals contemporary clinical descriptions of the effects of childhood sexual abuse. It is a brilliant, compassionate, eloquently argued, closely reasoned document, it's triumphant title. And exultant tone suggests that Freud viewed his contribution as the crowning achievement in the field. So what the heck happened? If Freud stated this and he wrote it down and he is like, I figured out all this stuff. What happened? Why did we never hear about this? Why was this never part of Freud's theories that he became famous for? You know, why did he become more famous for like edible things and, and penis envy and repressed sexual desires toward parents and stuff like that?
Speaker 0 00:22:16 Like what's up with that? Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, what happened was society. Society happened. The society of the time, the feminist movement started showing up in the late 1870s or so, particularly in France. It uh, women got very assertive on behalf of trying to gain their own equal rights to men. This is white women. So do you wanna copy out that feminist movement in Europe was still very much white women. It wasn't really intended for women of color, but nonetheless they got really assertive. And the political climate in France got very us versus them with the them being feminists and the us being the men in all the positions of power. And it included men in positions of science and scientific research. The feminists really worked very highly critical of SKU's work, for example, for the fact that he was just kind of, you know, putting women on display in the context of studying a disease.
Speaker 0 00:23:23 So there was that recognition that this was not the best treating women like they were objects was not so great, and that this science was fundamentally flawed to some extent from the feminist, right? But because this made the political climate very heated, and the men in all the positions of power and the men who held the wealth of the nation very much felt threatened by the feminist movement. That all plays into what it meant for Freud to give this report. See? And for Freud to say their society suffers from this pervasive violence committed against women, and specifically sexual assault, committed against young women regardless of their social status and their class, right? So that added fuel to the fire of the feminist movement, right? And it added an additional fuel to the feeling of being under attack by the men in positions of power at the time, right? So that's something to consider because within a year, Freud had privately repudiated his traumatic theory of the origins of hysteria.
Speaker 0 00:24:40 He did so because it was met with silence and disdain from the men in his field and from the men who ran society. Basically, if Freud wanted to have a career, he needed to not talk about the trauma these women had gone through. Because here's the thing, as Heller says, hysteria was so common among women that if his patient's stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called perverted acts against children were endemic. Not only among the proletariat of Paris where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. So remember Janay, he was looking at the lower class people at that hospital where Shareco did his studies, but Freud in Vienna, he was talking to upper class women.
Speaker 0 00:26:00 That's why he was talking to people of intellect and education. That's probably why he came up with the idea that, oh no, this could occur in people even if they have clarity of mine and high intellect and high education. Because he was studying among very privileged women who were very wealthy, who came from essentially the best families of Vienna. And they told him about molestation, about being traded around to their father's friends as a favor. He heard that stuff and he wrote it down and then he presented it like I found the answer. And then the men said, no, you didn't. You definitely didn't find the answer. And I mean, I can only assume how many of the men who heard or read his record were the same men that the women were talking about. So given that if Freud could kept talking about this, it was made very clear.
Speaker 0 00:26:56 He would never be heard from again. He would not have a career, he would not be able to write about medical stuff, he would not have a name. He stopped listening to his female patients. He entered into kind of a more combatant relationship with one of his last cases, the case of Dora. This is where Dora explained that she was used as a pawn in her father's sexual intrigues and offered her to his friends as a sexual toy. And Freud refused to validate that Freud wanted to explore more her feelings of pleasure from it, her erotic excitement at it. So this is where he started to come up with the idea that maybe all the stuff she's talking about wasn't actually real. That it was actually a fantasy that it came from some sort of desire she had toward her father and her father's friends.
Speaker 0 00:27:52 Essentially, I can't help but wonder, I'm not a psychologist, but I can't help but wonder how much of Freud's interest in these secret sexual fantasies of children being interested in their parents came out of this idea of if he had, if he felt he had to recant and deny what he initially thought, the only way he could really think to rectify hearing 18 plus women tell him about these experiences with society saying, that can't be real. It can't be true, because that means it's everywhere. I could only think that he had to, he had to tell himself they were fantasies. So I almost wonder if that's why he got into a confrontational, you know, place with Dora, is that he just had to find something that explained why so many of these women, so many of these hysterical women were telling the same stories. And I think boiling it down to these experiences weren't real, that they were actually just fantasies, that these women were confused about reality versus fantasy was the best way he could think to do it.
Speaker 0 00:29:02 And in fact, Heller again continues on to say that by the first decade of the 20th century without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue. I was at last obligated to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place and that they were only fantasies, which my patients had made up. And when Freud recanted, this was the end of the study of hysteria. And as much as I wanna think Freud was such a coward for recanting, there might have been some truth in the, the threats of him not having a career. Because you might remember Jana was also doing this same work with a slightly different female population in Paris. So why was Freud's Recantation the end of this study? Well, Janae didn't abandon his theory. He felt that the hysteria still was rooted in trauma and especially sexual trauma.
Speaker 0 00:30:07 And he didn't retreat from these hysterical patients. But his works were forgotten. His writings were neglected, his ideas were rejected by the scientific community. He kind of fell away from psychological history because he didn't recant. So if Freud had done that, perhaps this podcast wouldn't have happened because perhaps this history would've been so well buried that perhaps even Judith Hermann wouldn't have thought to write a chapter on it. And her book, which is kind of an interesting food for thought, but this is what I mean, is that there is dehumanization in science. There is dehumanization in medicine because there's dehumanization in society at large. And because dehumanization is a very powerful and persuasive way to get people to deny the existence of atrocities. And so to close this out, I'm going to include some excerpts from Hermann's book. No matter how cogent his arguments or how valid his observations, Freud's discovery could not gain acceptance in the absence of a political and social context that would support the investigation of hysteria wherever it might lead.
Speaker 0 00:31:24 He went on to develop a theory of human development in which the inferiority and mendacity of women are fundamental points of doctrine in an anti-feminist political climate. This theory prospered and thrived end quote. So perhaps not too surprising to us in today's world to know that because the people in charge of society at the time wanted the supremacy of men wanted to maintain their positions of power by maintaining a sense of superiority over other genders, other people of different races, et cetera, et cetera. They really liked that theory. That said, it's all fantasy. And I can't help but wonder if really Freud came up with that theory because how else would you rectify recanting the knowledge that you know, right? He knew these women went through all this abuse and suffered this violence at the hands of their own family members, at the hands of men who are supposed to love them and care for them.
Speaker 0 00:32:28 And he had to recant it. If he wanted a career, what, how else are you gonna rationalize that, right? Like that's a huge cognitive dissonance for Freud to have to say like, I have have to somehow deny these people their victimhood and invalidate it, and I have to do it under some sort of guise of psychology or science basically. Cuz that's what he knows and that's his field, right? And and this is what cognitive dissonance does. It makes us justify things in our mind. So I can't help but wonder if his whole repackaging of the message, the reason he went with that is partly because of the threat of the feminist movement, but also possibly, perhaps partly because of, and this is my own just guessing here, but maybe it's also because of how difficult it would be to rectify the denial of victimhood to people he listened to so closely to for so many months.
Speaker 0 00:33:23 But if it's all fantasy, then they're not really victims, right? It's not really real. So you don't have to feel too bad about denying it after the turn of the century. This whole line of trying to figure out what the answer was to female hysteria just fell away. It fell out of popularity. Nobody was that interested in anymore. And hypnosis and altered states of consciousness were reg relegated to like the occult, right to the study of supernatural stuff. So psychological trauma study just kind of came to a halt and it didn't really get picked back up until World World War I. When young men went off to war and they came back with psychological trauma, they came back with something that was being referred to as shell shock. They came back as different people. That's when the study of trauma reemerged. And I find it very interesting that even today we associate the history of the study of trauma with the military, and we associate it with things like World War I and shell shock and we'd still talk about P T S D with a really strong emphasis on military personnel.
Speaker 0 00:34:35 Not that they don't have it, I'm not saying they don't, and I'm not saying it's not a very serious thing. And it's good that we studied it and it's good that we know things about it. But folks, it wasn't until the 19, I say I think about the 1970s, that research into sexual molestation actually began again, it was nearly a hundred years later that people started to recognize that PTSD didn't have to just come from military exploits. That it could actually come from childhood experiences and trauma experience there. It could come from domestic violence and abuse. That's where we started to think about that. Actually, again, it wasn't until a good, nearly a hundred years later, and it's interesting to me that the history of the study of trauma was never silenced once it came down to when men went off and came back damaged, quote unquote.
Speaker 0 00:35:29 Not that, I mean that they, I think they're really damaged, but that's the way they were seen when they came back. What I think is very interesting is that essentially you take a white male at the pinnacle of society and you sent him off to war, and he comes back different and he comes back disabled, mentally crippled by these memories and these emotional outbursts, and people suddenly go, oh no, a pinnacle of society has had something happen to them. Whereas with women, at the time, women weren't fully human really, were we in the 19th century? We weren't allowed to own land most of the time, unless there was like some Aris aristocratic loophole. Women's property became property of her husband, et cetera, et cetera. So perhaps not too surprising, but very disheartening that when trauma is initially discovered in a minority group, it gets shushed because the trauma was cuing from the people who were in power.
Speaker 0 00:36:33 But when the trauma affected the people of the class and of the race of the majority group of the people in power, that's when the research stuck. That's when it became a very serious thing. We needed to look into how interesting, how very, very interesting. But being that we are a field that is primarily female, or at least identifying as female, although we don't quite have the research yet, we don't quite have the um, stats for how many non-binary folks we have in our field. But thanks to Laga, I believe we're gonna be getting that data at the next census. Yay. But considering that as the last census that as Asha took, we are still 97% female. I thought this whole history of female hysteria is an interesting way to introduce this idea of dehumanization in medicine and what it can mean when we're a little too excited about objectivity.
Speaker 0 00:37:39 Because Charco, like I said, he was very objective. He was so objective. He wasn't even going to have the women's words sway him. He wanted to keep his science pure. And once the science got down to let's actually listen to them and observe, and when a determination was made based off of listening, when that determination threatened society at the time and threatened those in a position of power, it was squashed because that's the power of the hierarchical structures of society. And that's the power of the people at the peak of that structure to dehumanize the people underneath it on the lower rungs of society. It's very easy to dismiss what they say because well do we really have to believe them? I mean, they're not exactly educated, right? We can always come up with something, we can always come up with some reason that, ah, maybe listening to the people who are actually part of that group isn't the best choice.
Speaker 0 00:38:51 We can't really believe what they have to say, right? Because they're biased, they're looking out for their own interests. And it's like, well, yeah, of course they're looking out for their interests. And of course they're biased in the direction of their own interests in what would be good and healthy for them, right? And it's funny how we think, well, if we listen to what they have to say, we're listening to their bias. And it's like, man, we're all bringing bias in. We all got it. We're all bringing it into all of these discussions all the time. But the power of dehumanization and the power of trying to keep things objective and scientific sometimes that provides the power to not listen. And that is not very trauma informed. My friends just not very trauma informed at all.
Speaker 0 00:39:44 Quoting Herman again, she says, the late 19th century studies of hysteria founded on the question of sexual trauma. At the time of these investigations, there was no awareness that violence is a routine part of women's sexual and domestic lives. Freud glimpsed this truth and retreated in horror for most of the 20th century. It was the study of combat veterans that led to the development of a body of knowledge about traumatic disorders. Not until the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are those not of men in war, but of women in civilian life. And this also relates more to another thing, Herman states, which is psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless at the moment of trauma. The victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force when the force is that of nature. We speak of disasters when the force is that of other human beings.
Speaker 0 00:40:46 We speak of atrocities, traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning. This is why I say at its core, trauma informed care is all about safety and empowerment. Because without access to physical, emotional, and psychological safety and some level of personal empowerment, you can't really develop resiliency, not true resiliency, right? And because of that hierarchical society, that white supremacy culture that we live in, as I discussed on my last episode, we have this really huge tendency to deemphasize the voices of people we consider less. So if you're not somebody at the top of our societal hierarchy, if you're not considered good enough or superior enough to have all the resources and to have all the power, you'll likely experience some level of marginalization or to feel like you don't have the power to say no or to feel like you have some internalized sense of shame for who you are, right?
Speaker 0 00:42:01 But if you're a little bit higher than another person, the issue with this whole hierarchy, right, is that if you have a position that's a little bit more powerful than the somebody else, you do also fall into the tendency to dismiss or minimize the voices of the people beneath you, which is the whole issue with societal privilege, implicit bias, implicit racism, and just general casual dehumanization, but also how dehumanization feeds into medicine and treatment plans and data and research. This is how this all sort of folds together. And I'm speaking particularly when we think about currently, for example, with the neurodiversity movement, right? There's still this whole like, you know, should it be compliance-based? Should it be behavioral first or regulation or trauma-informed? Like what is a trauma-informed way of doing? Neurodiversity is to be reaffirming. Reaffirming is trauma-informed, strengths-based approach is trauma informed for sure.
Speaker 0 00:42:55 But my main thing is that it's not just for neurodiversity, right? It's not just for the neurodivergent movement, it's for whatever group comes out of the woodwork and says, Hey, this treatment hurts us. Treating us in this way, doing these things with us is traumatizing to us. That is a sign that we need to be flexible. We need to listen to what they have to say, and we need to adjust what we're doing, right? Because the science doesn't exist in a vacuum. Another quote I wanna use here to emphasize that is by Aubrey Gordon from the podcast Maintenance Phase, which I absolutely adore. I'm not affiliated with them, but I love maintenance phase. And it's from the zombie statistics episode. So what she says here is what the research shows and what the lived experience of marginalized people shows is that our understandings of health are a direct result of those institutional, cultural and political factors.
Speaker 0 00:44:00 That it is a pretty straight line between what our institutions decide to do and the health outcomes of any given population. And it's so frustrating to have so many conversations about this stuff that are like, no, no, no, no, no, I just wanna talk about the science. And it's like, buddy, you can't talk about the science without talking about the bias that is baked into the science. It's by Aubrey Gordon, once again, maintenance phase, great podcast. But that's what I'm saying. Saying if we're gonna use evidence as a way to dismiss when a group says what you're doing is hurting us, we're not being trauma-informed because the evidence, what we should do in a trauma-informed sense is look back at that evidence and say, is this evidence for something that promotes someone's safety and empowerment? Or is this something that doesn't really consider that, that doesn't consider an individual's safety or empowerment at all, or a group safety or empowerment. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:45:01 So this is leading into why I really wanna get into the rhetoric of dehumanization and how it shows up in science and also in medicine, because I do think it also has an impact in decision making in our own field because our field effectively comes from a medical stance when it comes to medical training and evidence-based and all of that. And I'm not saying don't be evidence-based, of course be evidence-based, but I'm saying let's make sure our evidence lines up with the trauma informed paradigm and our treatment decisions line up with a trauma informed paradigm. I'm saying this should be the umbrella under which we make our evidence-based decisions because there can always be erroneous evidence out there that denies the lived experience of minorities and denies the oppression and the trauma that comes from that. And that's not trauma informed. It's just not, and it never will be. Alrighty, I think it's time to wrap it up for today. So I hope you all have a great week or two, and I hope you do. Please join me again as we all try to figure out what it really means to be trauma informed LPs.
