World War I

“As the war wore on, shell shock increasingly compromised the efficiency of
the fighting forces. Caught between taking the suffering of their soldiers
seriously and pursuing victory over the Germans, the British General Staff
issued General Routine Order Number 2384 in June of 1917, which stated, “In
no circumstances whatever will the expression ‘shell shock’ be used verbally or
be recorded in any regimental or other casualty report, or any hospital or other
medical document.” All soldiers with psychiatric problems were to be given a
single diagnosis of “NYDN” (Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous).4 In November 1917
the General Staff denied Charles Samuel Myers, who ran four field hospitals for
wounded soldiers, permission to submit a paper on shell shock to the British
Medical Journal. The Germans were even more punitive and treated shell shock
as a character defect, which they managed with a variety of painful treatments,
including electroshock.
In 1922 the British government issued the Southborough Report, whose goal
was to prevent the diagnosis of shell shock in any future wars and to undermine
any more claims for compensation. It suggested the elimination of shell shock
from all official nomenclature and insisted that these cases should no more be
classified “as a battle casualty than sickness or disease is so regarded.”5 The
official view was that well-trained troops, properly led, would not suffer from
shell shock and that the servicemen who had succumbed to the disorder were
undisciplined and unwilling soldiers. While the political storm about the
legitimacy of shell shock continued to rage for several more years, reports on
how to best treat these cases disappeared from the scientific literature. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

That is just part of the history of trauma research. And the battle continues.

Someone always has an agenda, power, control, money as in all the drugs sold to control difficult children, and adults. No conspiracy theory here, just hard cold fact. At least I see it as cold, certainly inhumane.

The effects of trauma are still swept under the rug but as I know little about the military and tons about surviving childhood abuse, including incest. I will stick to my own experience.

Nobody wants to know there is child abuse. Nobody wants to know there is rampant incest. But all the people who say “this has nothing to do with me” “this could never happen in my family” or “my child would never LET anyone…” are wrong. They remain willfully ignorant and part of the challenge.

Reading this book has opened my own eyes; I knew what happened to me, and I watched my life unfold with a will of its own, mind boggled at my lack of control over it. Now I see the bigger picture. I am sad and angry that my life was hi-jacked by the trauma imprint on my brain and all the people who swept trauma as the cause under the rug.

Freud was one of the earliest people to talk about the trauma of incest but he backed off when he realized it would implicate his father. We are not new to families protecting their own.

Something has to change. People need to say “how can I help” instead of “just get over it” because there is no such thing as just getting over trauma, the body does keep the score and my reactions to triggers has exploded my world time and time again as well as my children’s worlds.

I wish every person who has been through trauma or knows someone who has would read this book.