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Contents, Part 2:
How does Trauma Impact?
What can we do?
Questions and Answers:
Sublimation, and psychological defences
Comparisons with Hiroshima
The impact of humiliation
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How does Trauma Impact?
Lord Alderdice: If you grow up, for example, in a Republican family that has a long history of people being involved in fighting against the British State, then getting involved in that is as natural, to you, as joining a regiment of the British Army is to somebody who grew up with their father and their grandfather and their great-grandfather all joining that regiment. It's part of the culture. It's not an outcome of internal conflict, it's part of the normal social development. There's nothing conflictual about it.
On the other hand, there are people who get involved because there is an internal conflict; there are reasons why they, themselves, have difficulties internally and they fit into the problem in society and express their difficulties in that way.
And then there's another group of people that get involved because they get very, very angry about what's happening. There are some people who got involved in the violence in Northern Ireland because they felt, on the Loyalist side for example, ‘all these bombings are taking place, I know that fellow that was killed, the police are doing nothing about it, the government is doing nothing about it, I'm going to do something about it! I'm going to get involved.' And of course, once you get involved, that has a dynamic of its own. So there isn't just one description of the Troubles ; it went through different phases. There's not one personality type of people and there's not one set of reasons why some people break down and others don't.
Certain colleagues – among them Oscar Daly here - have looked in detail at hundreds of people who have been injured in the Troubles , particularly people who have come forward for medical legal reports and so on, to try to see if it's more likely that they'll break down. Because only a minority of people break down. If there was a bomb explosion right here, for example, not everybody would break down; a minority of people would, the rest would find a way of getting through it and get on with their lives.
Is it to do with gender? It doesn't seem to be. Is it to do with whether you're unemployed, or not unemployed or handicapped or not handicapped, or whether you expected it, or whether you didn't? It's very difficult to find a reason why. Except perhaps - and it is a perhaps, because it's very difficult to demonstrate this - that for some people the event that they experience has a meaning, a particular meaning for them that is personal, and is to do with their history and background, and chimes in with the experience that they have and that links with the kind of breakdown they have. There is certainly some evidence of that.
There are also other people who fall into the category that has been referred to of the bottle being full. They just have had so much trauma. It's a bit like people in the First World War. They got ‘March Fracture,' because they were loaded up with big rucksacks and they had to trudge along for miles and miles, and eventually, not because of any particular weakness in their bones, their bones just started to crumble. You can't hammer bones that hard for that long without them starting to crumble.
Similarly, I think that that happens psychologically with people. I've noticed it; I did some work some years ago in a hospice and it seemed quite clear to me that with the majority of people, if they worked in a hospice for long enough, in direct patient contact, they began to either fall ill, take sabbaticals, have marriage breakdowns - something started to crumble psychologically. I think there is a difficulty for a lot of people if you just keep on and on at the one piece of work day and daily.
That is where this notion that journalists, working in the same place over a long period of time, facing a repeated difficult, high emotion experience, have to either find some way of protecting themselves psychologically, or find ways in which they start to crumble. Most of them find ways of protecting themselves, thankfully; but not everybody does.
That's true of frontline health professionals, it's true of even security forces, it's true of people in paramilitary organisations, it's true of the families of people in paramilitary organisations and the families of people in the security forces and so on.
What do we try to take out of all of this? Well, I think the first thing is that there is a remarkable resilience in people. It's surprising how people do manage to survive. At the same time, I think Oscar's right, that we kidded ourselves that because we weren't seeing the clinical manifestations during the height of the Troubles themselves, that that meant nothing was happening. There was this kind of notion that the kids were marvellously unaffected by what was going on. I remember quite a number of years ago saying, when I was beginning in psychotherapy, that I was seeing people who were experiencing, as adults, difficulties that came out of experiences as children. This was regarded as a very strange thing to say and running quite in the face of all the clinical wisdom. So it seemed to me that there's some kind of defence, that said that we don't want to acknowledge how much, as a community, we are potentially damaging the next generation.
What can we do?
Is there anything that we can do? Well, I think one of the things that we can do is to try and overcome our resistance to looking at the problems, and to doing research and finding out what works and what doesn't work. For example, we've discovered that some of the things that we thought might work, like debriefing immediately after events, doesn't seem to work at all as well as people thought. So common sense doesn't necessarily give you the right answer to some of these things. We've got to get over our resistance and actually do the kind of research work, which maybe will help us along with it.
The second thing is, I think, that we need to start acknowledging that there are real problems for people whose jobs take them into such problem areas - such as journalists, or doctors or other kinds of health professionals, or security forces. It's not an easy thing to solve, because the defences you need to create in order to survive doing the work may actually make it difficult for you to process the problem.
Finally, a brief comment on the question of a Truth Commission, or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or some kind of instrument that communally addresses the history of the last 30 years. There are many reasons for having one; do you continue having inquiries like that into Bloody Sunday, which cost as much as two or three hospitals. Will these necessarily solve the problem?
I was in Chile ten years after the Rettig Commission there, and that was lauded as a very good Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And yet at that point a lot of people were saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute! The guys who owned up to all of these kinds of things are doing very well, thank you! They're writing books, they're being interviewed on panels, they're getting paid large amounts of money and they've got an amnesty. And what about us, the people who have suffered? We've got nothing. Our areas are still underdeveloped, nobody has given us any mental health services, our children are destroyed.'
And the kind of question that was pointed up here, was, ‘What did all this mean? All the sacrifice, all the suffering?' And if I was a Republican I'd be saying to myself, ‘Do you think I went through all of that for half-a-dozen cross-border bodies? We could have had that in 1973.'
If I was a policeman I would say to myself, ‘What the devil did I do all that for?' I can understand why some of them are cracking up and others are leaving and so on.
And for a lot of journalists - thoughtful, analytical people – it's not, as you say, Mervyn, about reporting the facts; it's about trying to understand the meaning behind it. That's what gives the excitement to journalism. It's not just saying that this happened and this and this happened, and tomorrow I'll tell you what happened tonight. It is about what is the meaning of that. What's trying to go on there? What's happening to the community? It's understanding that meaning.
And yet the very understanding of the meaning and the conflicted meanings is a very difficult problem and struggle, and if you try to express it you get hammered from one side or the other, or in my case, sat upon by both sides. And yet once we lose the struggle for meaning, we lose something that is absolutely essential to being a human being and to being a professional journalist or a psychiatrist or a novelist or an artist or even, believe it or not, a politician.
Questions and Answers:
Mark Brayne: I must say that those who've chosen to miss this debate and go to see Simon and Garfunkel tonight in Hyde Park are really missing out tonight. That was a fascinating set of introductory comments. Rather than picking up individual points, let's put it out to the floor - comments, questions? I've heard a lot that was absolutely fascinating.
Gavin Rees: My name's Gavin Rees. I'm a freelance Assistant Producer and I'm currently working on a programme about Hiroshima, which obviously involves bombing. A lot of the contributions have talked about how trauma happens to people in the field; you start as a journalist, you start as psychotherapist, you start as a politician or whatever, and you're in a situation where trauma happens to you and you then have to process it afterwards.
I was particularly interested in what has been said about children, and how children deal with, or have dealt with the Troubles. A lot of those children now would be of professional age, and will have started working as journalists and perhaps as therapists. So my question is, to what extent does getting involved in trauma, work as a solution to dealing with trauma? Because a lot of the people I interview find it helpful to get involved in peace movements or something, as a way of going back to the places that they were before - which were horrible, terrible places to be - and to try and subtract some meaning from them. That's my question.
Oscar Daly: Two things; I think a lot of people do go into health professions - and particularly psychological therapy, psychiatry, psychiatric nursing, or whatever - because of difficulties they've had themselves. Now sometimes it is because they have worked through those difficulties and feel that they are more aware of these problems and have something to offer. But a lot of people, I feel, go into psychiatry and other professions because of problems they still have, and they're looking for the solution. That creates difficulties; not only for that individual but also for the people they try to treat.
Sublimation, and psychological defences
The second point is about a term called sublimation. It's one of those psychological defences that are unconscious, and some people deal with some problem or trauma by getting involved with something; usually by getting involved in peace and so on. One example that I feel is a very good example of that is Colin Parry, whose son was killed in the Warrington bombs, almost 10 years ago now. He's involved in looking at how people in the mainland United Kingdom have been affected by our Troubles , how they're dealing with - or not dealing with - their problems, and what services they have available to them.
And I think he has sublimated superbly. I don't know the man, it may be that he still has his terrors and internal demons and so on, but certainly the public face is that he is someone who has grown hugely from his own personal trauma.
John Alderdice: Well, of course, this generation is not unique. The experience of Hiroshima was, in some senses, unprecedented, and the impact that it had was also unprecedented. But people have always experienced war and trauma and difficulties.
There are some things that we do know about this. For example, if somebody is abused as a child, we know that some of those who are abused manage remarkably well. Others don't find such a good way of processing it and they become abusers themselves.
Another group of people process it more or less, and go into helping other kids who are being abused. And one of the interesting questions, to which I have no idea of the answer and I'm not sure if we have the answer yet, is, What is it that makes one person who has been abused, into an abuser, and another person who has been abused into a worker for Doctor Barnardo's? It's a very, very important question.
Of course - as Oscar quite rightly points out - in the case of the person who comes into working for Dr Barnardo's, you might say, “Well, that's obviously the right outcome.” But if they haven't found a way of digesting or processing or working their way through the abuse that they've suffered, they may, in a kind of mixed kind of way, bring that into their work in a fashion which is not entirely unabusive.
It's a bit like the child who comes back home from the dentist and grabs their teddy bear and pretends to drill its teeth and says, ‘I'm going to fix your teeth and it won't hurt very much'. In that example it's not really a turning from being the abuser to being the carer, it's a turning from being abused to being an abuser, but in a rather subtle kind of way. So there are all sorts of mixed pictures in this in terms of how we process it.
The one thing that we do have to be careful about is, in our situation in Northern Ireland, is this. There's been quite a vogue to have community groups that would deal with all sorts of people who have suffered trauma. I think we will begin to discover evidence, over the next 10 or 15 years, of people being abused in these groups; not necessarily because people went in to them with the intent of abusing, but because they hadn't actually had the professional boundaries that helped them to process, in some sense, the experience they've been through. And they use the other people with whom they come into contact to deal with their problems, rather than actually processing them properly.
Mervyn Jess: Well this is quite unusual – a panel very nearly all in agreement. But I'll just pick up on that last point that John made and you Gavin. You asked the question about kids growing up and maybe being exposed to trauma at an early age, and then how do they go, etc.
The one example that springs to mind is after the Shankhill bombing (in 1993). There was a young man who lost his wife in that, and I think his daughter was injured as well. He went on to be one of the moving forces in what you were talking about, John, a kind of community-based group dealing with the trauma of all the victims of similar atrocities. And to my knowledge he actually went on to study for an Open University degree and other related subjects, and is now used quite widely as a commentator on these issues.
Now, that's only happened in the last 10 years and that guy probably never even thought in his wildest dreams, coming from a working class background in the Protestant Loyalist Shankhill Road , that he would ever end up where he is now; albeit through a very tragic set of circumstances. But there he is, working his trauma out, as he would see it, for the betterment of other people in Northern Ireland and further afield, which is a positive thing.
I've seen instances where people from one community or the other would run to a trauma or community group in their own community, who wouldn't necessarily move outside of that community; so whatever it is that they're bringing to it, it's a bit more ‘coloured' if you like, because it's green, white and gold or it's red, white and blue – Protestant, Catholic, Unionist.
As regards the young people, I can only talk about my own generation. The BBC's newsroom is something of a melting pot in Belfast, of people from a community which has been at war, physically, for 30-odd years. There are working class families, guys who grew up in West Belfast in the Catholic area; guys who grew up in North Belfast in Protestant areas, and families outside of Belfast or outside of Londonderry or Derry, who were in rural areas but who had been at times touched by the violence but not to the same extent as people living in the major cities and the major towns.
A lot of them are working with me at the minute. They went on to university, they took up a career in journalism, they have friends that they grew up with – some of them went to jail because they went to the paramilitaries; some of them went to law and for no other reason than that was the road they took. There's no hard and fast answer to it; you can't say, ‘But why? You suffered the same as he did but you went to journalism and you went to law. Why didn't you feel the need to go into a Paramilitary grouping?' It was probably the obvious place to go for some of them and the door was wide open, believe me, but I can't give you a really hard and fast answer.
People make choices in life, and they just made the choices, and those who chose one path went that way, and those who chose the other path went the other way. And that's maybe one of the strengths of the community that is Northern Ireland, even with the fact that it's got two sides at odds with each other, that they can, through it all, go on to do other things other than try to destroy each other, I suppose.
Mark Brayne: Gavin, can I throw the question back to you? You're doing what promises to be a fascinating BBC documentary re-enacting and re-examining what it was actually like to be there at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, which is going to be broadcast next year. You're dealing with people who have experienced and survived the most extraordinary imaginable trauma, both in terms of what they personally experienced and what they witnessed. What are the echoes that are coming up from what you've been hearing this evening for the kind of rather deep work that you're doing - the interviewing of the survivors where your work is shading in some ways into the therapeutic?
Gavin Rees: In many ways, the fact of trauma itself is a kind of constant thing, in that it seems to demand certain responses to people; certain things happen to them, they have to process that information. But there's something different about the Bomb, I think, which was that it was so total and it was so extraordinary that there was no way of escaping. So, for many years, most of the victims had a kind of passivity imposed on them by the Bomb, because you couldn't fight against it. There was nowhere to go.
Comparisons with Hiroshima
Japan was a country after the war that capitulated; if you were traumatised, you didn't have an option of becoming a paramilitary or anything like that. That seems to me to be a distinct difference. The thing that I find interesting about it is trying to guess how well the various people I interview have coped. It's a kind of silly game, because you can't really tell. But it's quite an urgent one when you're sitting in a chair for two, three, four hours or however long it is, talking to somebody not so much about experiences as about a landscape that you've come to know very well. Because you talk to everybody, and they were all in the same burning city, and they all saw similar kinds of things.
The thing that I've found that alarms me somewhat among the people I interviewed is one person who tells the story with the most convincing sense of presence, who also comes across as extremely meditative and calm and relaxed, as if she's dealt with it. This is a woman who's a devout Buddhist, a wonderful old lady who talks in very measured tones, very calmly, about all the experiences. Yet, I think she is probably, with one exception among all the people I interviewed, the person who has dealt with it the least well.
She's dealt with it in the most sophisticated manner. She's sublimated a lot of these feelings in a very complicated way, and she regularly talks to children about the experiences, saying, kind of half-jokingly ,that at first it didn't work out.
‘At first', she says, ‘I was telling children, and the mothers would come back to me saying, ‘My God, my little daughter can't sleep. What have you been telling her?' And so I had to change the story; so now I can tell kids and I can tell anyone and they can understand as much as I can tell them. Of course they can't understand completely because they weren't there.' She says that very strongly.
I've interviewed other old women of the same generation who were in the same city, who cried. When they hit the point at which they described their friends dying, they'd break down into incredibly bitter tears. They're full of anger, and they're full of all these raw emotions that when you look at them, they look extremely unprocessed, extremely un-dealt with.
Then at a flick of a switch they'll be talking about how the other schoolgirl they were with, who survived, whose husband is terrible and everything is wrong, and how she buys all the wrong things at department stores. And the storyteller starts joking, and you see the face change, and I think that what the experience of interviewing these people has taught me – a bit similar to some of these underlying themes that everybody is taking about – is that there is no single way of dealing with this kind of stuff.
You come across somebody who you think has dealt with it - and they haven't. And vice-versa; somebody who appears not to have dealt with it … I met a man who was extremely traumatised as a young child, was hospitalised for medical conditions. In some ways I think he's probably safer than a lot of the other more complicated people I've interviewed, because he's kind of wrapped himself up in the elements of his story which are comforting to him.
John Alderdice: There are a couple of comments I'd like to make on that. The first is there's a sort of assumption, a kind of wish fantasy that's around, that if people have been damaged psychologically, they should be able to be healed psychologically. We all know that it's not the case physically a lot of the time. So why should it be the case psychologically? If I break my collarbone, even if it mends up, if I feel it 10 years later there's still a bump there. And so the idea that these things are always mendable is a wish but it's not necessarily the case.
The second thing is that I think there is a big difference between one enormously traumatic event, whether it's being in a plane coming down or whatever, and the living with constant trauma and threat of violence over 10, 15, 20 years. I've come to the view that a lot of the people who are most damaged by child abuse, the ones who are most damaged, are the ones who lived with it over a period of time; not necessarily the ones who – you know, somebody flashed at them, or something like that. If they had a problem afterwards, it was because it was linked with something else they haven't yet told you about. The single event is a different kind of thing, and therefore I see more similarities in a sense with Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka or Northern Ireland and Peru, than I do with Hiroshima.
But there's another component that I think is common. I've come to the view that one of the reasons – and it's one of the most powerful reasons why people get involved with terrorism – is because they don't believe they're doing something wrong. They believe that of course they're breaking all sorts of laws and social norms, but they are doing it in the service of righting a terrible wrong. And they believe that their community has been humiliated - not just wronged, but deeply wronged and humiliated.
The impact of humiliation
And I cannot help but feel that what one needs to put into any understanding of Hiroshima and its aftermath, is the incredible humiliation that it was to the Japanese people – not just by bringing the war to an end in such a catastrophic way – but in the way that Japan was dealt with afterwards. We're only now, in the last few years, trying to persuade the Japanese that they ought to be able to have an army that can go around and do this and that and the other thing. But for a whole lifetime, the Japanese people, who were a nation for whom people being able to be a soldier was a very important thing, were told, ‘You're wiped out, and on top of that you can't even have a national standing army that can actually do anything significant.'
I think that there's a degree of humiliation, which of course was the case for Germany after the First World War and laid the seeds for the Second World War. So when one thinks about Hiroshima, there are all sorts of other things that must be part of the mix as well as the unbelievably horrifying actual event of the time.
Elizabeth Capewell: My name's Elizabeth Capewell and I've worked in Northern Ireland since 1994. One of the things that troubles me most is this. When I was first invited over in '94, I thought ‘what can I offer people in Northern Ireland?' I'd had experience of major, but single incidents; so I went over with a lot of trepidation, working with teachers and social-workers. And I was absolutely amazed that what I gave to them was the first input they'd had on trauma of any kind, and they were just so grateful; and that was 1994!
Since then, the other work I've done in the community is in schools. I can cope with denial on an individual basis. I think anyone has the right to deny. But when it becomes an institutional denial, it becomes something different. What still troubles me quite a lot is the level of resistance, say in the Education Boards, to taking a management approach to really looking at some of these issues. Not just in a negative way, but addressing wider issues, building up coping skills and things like that.
If I can give one example. I was actually living the denial over quite a long time, working in a small school of 70 people. Some of the children were multi-bereaved by bombing. But when you scratch the surface - anywhere in Northern Ireland - a whole lot of other trauma comes out that has never been brought into the air before.
It took two months of hard work and advocacy to get a one-day session with the teachers at school – who were desperate, absolutely desperate, for some support and help - and then to get some of the people from the education departments involved. It then took another few months to get a couple of days' work; I think another five months to get a programme. So it's really minimal. We did what we could but for the level of trauma it really was minimal.
The kind of work I do is trying to burst through the stigma and the resistance; I think I'm often working in that gap that stops people getting to the help that they need. I'm trying to build a system so that people do get the stepping-stones to do that, and the role of the schools is absolutely crucial. From what I've heard from other people who have done research into the levels of trauma in schools, there are very high levels of trauma amongst children. But when they've tried to take the issues again to the Education Boards, they seem to close up and back off. So I just wonder what your perspective on that is and whether anything more can be done?
Mark Brayne: Thank-you Elizabeth. Before we come back to that – and if the panel could store some of the responses to the questions as they come in – I'd just like to turn the journalism educators here tonight. We've got two trainers - Ros Toynbee from the BBC and Nick Nugent, a freelance trainer. Nick, you've worked in Afghanistan, and also in Indonesia. And Ros, you do some significant training with journalists here.
Elizabeth, you talk about resistance in schools and just how long it's taken, and certainly one of the messages coming out of this discussion is just how long it's taken for the issue of trauma to surface in broadcast programmes, in journalistic representation and in personal awareness. What are the implications for journalism training out of what we've been hearing so far?
Nick Nugent: Well, I think I'd just like to make it a question, because, as you say, I've worked with groups of journalists deeply involved in conflict in various places. Trauma is something little understood in a place like Afghanistan, and I'm not just speaking about journalists, I'm speaking much more widely. Possibly that's no surprise, since they have so many things to worry about. They're really not at the level of trying to assess how to cope with trauma, or even to recognise trauma.
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