The Rootstock of Synchronosophy (Part I, Chapter 4/6)
Adjustments to an Unnatural World
Have I gone mad? I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers.
But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
〰 Lewis Carroll 〰
Into the Jungle of Collective Trauma
Comprehension was absolutely impossible because
we were in shock, from the things we learned there.
〰 Alice Ricciardi von Platen 〰
On the day World War II was declared, Adolf Hitler signed a decree which effectively made the murder of disabled people legal.
“Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew,” Hitler declared in one of his speeches (quoted by Alice Ricciardi von Platen in her book The Killing of the Mentally Ill in Germany.)
To achieve his goal of ‘leading the Aryan race back to its purest form and destined supremacy’, he believed that the German nation had to be ‘cleansed from all impurities’.
Following the Darwinian evolutionary theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’, Hitler concluded that physical and mental disabilities were ‘contaminating the nation’ and developed a secret strategy of ‘genetic cleansing.’ This lead to the so-called ‘mercy-killings’ of an estimated 300,000 children, adolescents, and adults during the war years.
The Nazi-program of euthanasia was executed by doctors and psychiatrists in mental hospitals, concentration camps, and special ‘treatment institutions’ all over the country.
During the Nuremberg Trials (1945/46), almost 200 war criminals were brought to justice by an American military tribunal. Many of the euthanasia-doctors stood trial.
Because the court-hearings had to be translated between four languages ~ German, English, French and Russian ~ the enormity of the task required a new format of communication. With conventional translation techniques the Trials would have lasted several years. Using headphones and microphones, the translators were assigned the challenging task of simultaneous interpretation for the first time ever.
Aunt Nora, my father’s first cousin and quasi sister, was one of the interpreters, “the unspoken heroes of the Nuremberg Trials.”
Their work was later described as “a groundbreaking development in simultaneous interpretation.” What went unnoticed, was the crushing impact of the Trials on the lives and mental health of the interpreters, and vicariously their families.
The Trials revealed the horrific crimes of the Nazis against anyone who did not match Hitler’s ideal of the ‘perfect human’. The first victims were primarily the mentally and physically ‘inferior specimen’ of the population of Germany.
During the war years, the definition of ‘mentally and physically inferior’ shifted fast to include anyone who did not fit in, anyone who belonged to ‘the wrong ethnicity’, and anyone with whom Hitler or his henchmen had a personal axe to grind.
Dr. Alice Ricciardi von Platen, a German psychiatrist who attended the ‘Doctor Trials’ as an expert witness, shared the heinous revelations made during those months in her book The Killing of the Mentally Ill in Germany, (first published in 1948).
The first edition never appeared on bookstore shelves. Most copies were instantly confiscated and pulped, the contents too shocking to be made known to the German public. (Presumably there were too many hospitals and doctors still in active service who had participated in those gruesome ‘mercy-killings’).
When I read the book (a later edition of identical content as the original) I was overcome with an eerie feeling that this had something to do with my personal story!
In the generation of my parents, emotional sensitivity was regarded as ‘mental instability’. If you were emotionally sensitive /mentally ‘unstable’ ~ a condition with which I was clearly afflicted ~ you could easily be considered a ‘borderline case’.
Aunt Nora suffered a ‘nervous breakdown’ at the Trials. Therefore she must have been ‘oversensitive/ unstable’~ according to my parents. An American psychiatrist subsequently looked after her, helped her recover (and later became her husband).
In my family ~ if you required psychotherapy or psychiatric treatment, that was bad news. You were written off as a nutcase and spoken about in a hushed voice. ‘Poor Nora! No wonder, having lost both parents at such a young age…’
Nora’s English mother had died in childbed. Her father, my grandmother’s beloved elder brother, had succumbed to a fatal battle injury a couple of weeks later. This was in 1914, the beginning of World War I. The baby was looked after and brought up by her aunt ~ my grandmother ~ as my father’s ‘elder sister’.
Thinking about Nora’s story, it only hit me much later that my parents must have been scared witless about ‘my condition’. They were unable to talk to me about any of this. The topic was so worrying, they didn’t have words for it.
The practice of Synchronosophy has helped me unearth and heal this missing piece of my past, which has had a powerful impact on my experience of life all through childhood, adolescence, and the best part of adulthood.
Synchronosophy is a way to unearth and heal historic trauma in the most obscure places.
Trauma Lying in Ambush
I am and always will be the wild untamed living spirit of this jungle.
〰 Francisco X. Alarcón 〰
Most people who know me would never guess that I am a ‘trauma survivor’. Coming to think of it, most people don’t look like ‘trauma survivors’. We are all brilliant at covering up our deepest pain and manage to show up in life as if ‘nothing bad ever happened’.
I haven’t suffered physical or sexual abuse as a child. I have never been raped. I haven’t experienced war first hand, or developed a life threatening disease.
Some critics claim that ‘trauma is only a fad’. They don’t understand why ‘everyone’ is talking about trauma all of a sudden…
We are talking about it because we finally can!
Trauma is a monster that chokes you up, clutches your chest, threatens to throttle you if you dare to speak up. Too many generations have been silenced. Too many survivors are still too scared or too ashamed to talk about it. When we talk about it to our nearest and dearest, they tell us to shut up! Not to rock the boat for Chrissake!
“Everything was fine until you brought this up,” they say. “Why do you have to be so negative? Let’s not wash our dirty linen in public.” And so we shut up, feel hurt all over again, and the trauma continues to fester and spread. It doesn’t take much.
Having read the brilliant book by Stephanie Foo What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), made me realise how surprisingly similar our post-traumatic symptoms are, despite entirely different histories and experiences during childhood and adolescence.
Trauma is not a competition. We are all affected by it, because trauma is the result of cultural, social and collective violations, not only in the Western world. Trauma-wounds fester everywhere. They are as similar and unique as we are.
Trauma literally means wound. And wounding can happen in many ways. The more vulnerable you are, the smaller the injury that can potentially traumatise you. We need to heal trauma ~ all of it ~ because if we don’t, it only gets worse.
Until recently we didn’t know about inter-generational and historic trauma. Now we can read about the symptoms of C-PTSD, for example, and identify them. We know that inexplicable physical symptoms, autoimmune diseases, or degenerative diseases can be results of unprocessed trauma, even if we don’t remember the experience of being traumatised.
(At the end of this chapter I have attached a downloadable file about Symptoms of C-PTSD)
Traumatic experiences come in many guises. What they all have in common is the paralysing effect they have on the victim. They trigger a protective response called dissociation, and in that moment parts of yourself get frozen in time.
If you have suffered some kind of trauma in early childhood ~ or inherited unprocessed trauma from your elders ~ then your organism or life experience is likely to show certain symptoms later on, which are a clear indication of the earlier trauma. This is a way to detect what has happened in the past, even if you can’t remember anything.
In my case, the first traumatic experience happened during birth. When my mother was pregnant with me, she developed a life threatening condition called pre-eclampsia towards the end of the third trimester. She went into labour two weeks early, and was given morphine to relieve the excruciating pain. We were both on the threshold between life and death.
The second trauma, I must assume, was the emotional abandonment I experienced in the aftermath. I’m pretty sure there was no healthy bonding, due to both of us being knocked out by morphine.
As soon as I was born, I was practically left to my own devices to ‘emotionally self-regulate’. The standard treatment of infants in those days was to let them cry.
¡¡¡Important Sidenote!!! I need to point out that the practice I am introducing in this book is not appropriate for processing acute trauma, or for treating severe childhood trauma as described by Stephanie Foo! This is not my expertise, so I can’t say anything about that.
What I can say is that in situations where the trauma history is more hidden and subtle ~ for example when you (or any ACE-survivor) have inexplicable C-PTSD symptoms, for no apparent reason ~ Synchronosophy offers powerful tools for processing and healing ~ provided the ACE-survivor has sufficient resources, willingness, and vital energy to do the inner work (or the opportunity to work with a therapist or ‘expert companion’ who understands the theory and practice of Synchronosophy).
Synchronosophy is not appropriate for processing acute trauma, or treating C-PTSD as a result of violence and physical abuse.
Invisible Trauma
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
〰 R.D. Laing 〰
As a child, I always looked up to my mother as perfect, although not as a role model. My self-esteem was too low to assume I could ever hold a candle to her. In my father’s eyes she could do no wrong, which confirmed my infantile assessment.
The education protocol in those days (at least in my family) was not to praise children, so they wouldn’t get too big for their boots. Sharp and condescending parental criticism for every slight imperfection would ensure that youngsters grew into a perfectly polished human specimen by the time they reached adulthood or preferably earlier.
Good Christian parents had to instill shame, guilt, and the fear of some almighty God into those imps to prevent them from becoming spoiled brats. At the same time we were continuously reminded of the fact that we were a perfect happy family, where no one had any reason to complain or be unhappy, ever. We were instructed to count our blessings several times daily, and ‘think of the poor children in Africa’.
I didn’t respond well to this pedagogical method. The assertion, drip-fed daily into my receptive young mind, was like a powerful affirmation: imperfect ~ inadequate ~ not good enough ~ ungrateful. Why? Because I felt neither perfect nor happy at all times. I developed the firm belief that there must be something terribly wrong with me. Instead of becoming the perfect daughter my mother had hoped to knock into shape, I turned into a shy, awkward girl, with the self-esteem of a beaten dog.
I didn’t suffer the physical, sexual, or psychological abuse normally associated with and described as ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACE). I was exposed to ongoing emotional neglect, affection-deficit, maternal criticism, and some creepy religious fervour.
Coupled with an emotional hypersensitivity, due to the circumstances of my birth, it was a classic combination for ‘low-key’ trauma, which gradually got worse.
During adolescence I developed the conviction that my mother ‘hated’ me. This was not true, of course. My parents did their very best to care for us, and were not aware of the importance of emotional nourishment. I think they wouldn’t even have understood what that meant, or known what to do, given their own strict Brethren upbringing.
But tell that to a child. If your own ‘perfect’ mother constantly puts you down in countless implicit ways, makes fun of you in front of others, never shows affection, and repeatedly affirms that you are a terrible disappointment, what else are you supposed to believe?!
In hindsight ~ I know it wasn’t about me at all. Under the mask of ultra-perfect perfection, my mother was struggling to accept herself and passed her self-rejection straight onto me ~ an effective way to continue the lineage of inter-generational trauma.
Dysfunctional parent-child patterns are not uncommon, and invisible trauma continues mostly under the radar so far. The personal details I’m sharing here might help others recognise the insidious family dynamics in the early years, which can lead to further trauma and potentially threatening situations in adulthood ~ as you will be able to witness in my story as the drama takes its course.
The main reason for sharing my story is to give you an idea of the multifaceted layers of the soil, in which Synchronosophy would eventually germinate and grow.
Perfectly healthy and emotionally high-sensitive people ~ now recognised as a form of neurodivergence ~ can easily become ‘mentally unstable’ in a world that deprives them of the opportunity to be themselves, unless they learn how to ‘self-regulate’.
Believe it or not, humans can only function optimally, and fulfill their potential, when they have the opportunity to be themselves. But this is extremely rare. Most people live far below their dreams and potential, dragging themselves through a life they hardly identify with, which is called ‘normal’.
Right now, in the 21st century, human life is getting crazier, spinning out of control, even in the most privileged countries. That more and more people react with ‘abnormal’ behavioural ‘mental’ symptoms is a natural response. The anthropocentric self-destructive answer to the problem is a new pigeon loft for pigeonholing all the ‘crazy people’. The euphemism for this phenomenon is ‘Mental Health Crisis’.
Synchronosophy has provided me with a set of powerful tools to heal the invisible trauma, which was ‘driving me mad’. Beyond the effective and efficient healing of the old wounds, the same tools have also served me (and others) to awaken and develop dormant potential, discover hidden talents, and become more fully ‘who I was born to be’.
Because that’s what true healing is really about. In anthropocentric language, healing is thought of as a recovery or restoring health. What if we are deeply wounded, and there is no health to ‘restore’ or ‘recover’?
True healing is a dynamic progression towards greater vitality and the capacity to participate in life ~ the life that is authentically yours. True healing is a life’s journey of growing towards wholeness.
Synchronosophy offers a set of powerful tools to heal invisible trauma and stimulate growth towards wholeness.
Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links
This is so wonderful, Veronika! In my work with the ancestors not only do I heal wounds/trauma, but I also like to attune to the gifts or positive resources. I loved so much to learn that you are living these positive resources through your translation work. That warms my heart! Thank you so much for everything you wrote here and for the downloadable information. I resonated so much with all of it. I, too, had a stable loving childhood, and yet live with hypersensitivity (which has been both a blessing and a curse). You are so right that allowing ourselves to be ourselves is what can open the path to healing. So looking forward to part 5! 🤗
I really look forward to each new installment of Synchronosophy. Was excited seeing this in the inbox. The subject matter for this one was much more personally entwined, and I found it very emotive and effective.
There are so many gems in this piece, and a huge one ☝️ in your comment above: “The emotional realm is timeless.”
I am convinced that merely being born human means being traumatized. Our very first entry into physical incarnation is a traumatic separation from the maternal womb, and in our current disconnected society, it so often just goes downhill from there.
That any single one of us is functioning at all is a miracle. Indeed we ARE miracles.