About tragedy, horror, trauma and augmentation.

Trauma comes in several varieties. There is sudden catastrophic experience (your house burns down, you are badly injured in a car accident); there is sustained exposure to catastrophic experience (you are a soldier in a bloody war zone, you live under a brutal dictatorship where people are regularly 'disappeared', tortured, or shot in the street, etc.) There is anticipated and experienced catastrophe (you live with an abuser who beats you, you are a soldier injured in a war zone.) They can go together, and there is no "stack bonus", just cumulative damage.

There is also the 'chronic slow-motion trauma' of being oppressed, denied opportunity, denied full human status, denied agency in your own life and future. Children who survive highly dysfunctional families (without experiencing actual physical abuse) and people in groups marginalized by institutional discrimination experience this.

There is also "exposure trauma" or "witness trauma". You're the person sitting near the shooting victim, the person who witnessed the suicide's body hitting the pavement. Your body reacts to the anticipation of catastrophic peril, even though you're not about to head up to the 26th floor and throw yourself out a window.

"Witness trauma" also includes what many are experiencing now, seeing pictures and hearing horrors about appalling atrocities being experienced by other humans.

All types of trauma are painful and damaging.

And all types of traumas include a specific type of effect called "augmentation".

Augmentation is essentially a short-circuit between the part of the brain that does detailed assessments, makes measured judgments, and acts based on rational criteria, and the flight-fight response.

What that means isn't that you CAN'T do detailed assessments, apply rational criteria, etcetera, but that the threshhold for doing so changes - you are more likely to feel emotions more intensely, perceive potential threats as more imminent, powerful, or inevitable/horrible, and make quicker fight/flight responses. If the augmentation is bad enough, you can even start seeing quite ordinary things as threats.

Augmentation also means that your balance between feelings-based response and thinking-based response to almost any stimulus has tipped more in the "feelings-based response" direction.

The danger inherent in this is that your critical thinking capacity weakens, and you become much more vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors who want to stir shit, to get you to make bad choices, say stupid things, and submarine yourself. (Gaslighters rely on this to potentiate the harm they do their victims.)

Here's the deal: Anyone who wants to damage a family, group, or even a nation/state, knows that when the members thereof are reeling from the pain of witness trauma is the PERFECT TIME to drive in wedges, spread disinformation, promote bad decisionmaking, and divide the group from within as people start to passionately disagree about incredibly consequential things, and form judgments about each other based on those disagreements.

Add in the fog of war and the already high disinformation noise-to-signal ratio, and they can do serious damage.

If you think this isn't happening RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, I can sell you a bridge, real cheap. (I need to replace a hot water heater. DM me... it's a great bridge.)

What can we do about this?

BE AWARE that what we are thinking and saying is being affected by witness trauma. BE AWARE that bad actors are using both accurate information and disinformation to increase this effect. BE AWARE that they will be doing their best to stir division.

Think before you post. Think twice or even three times before you reply to a post. Give yourself a waiting period or a time out if you can sense how strong your emotions are, step away, take a short walk in fresh air, have a cup of tea, then edit what you might have posted. Remind yourself that others are suffering the same augmentation. Cut them slack.

Keep reminding yourself, good thinking is going to create better choices and make better decisions that will benefit those who need the benefit right now - whose trauma is direct and experiential and catastrophic.

somberly,
Bright