Secondary Passions Promote Beginner’s Mind

A child is open to many possibilities
while the expert sees only a few*

I thought I had retired as a psychotherapist, but I continued on by other means writing a column every week for the Concord Monitor. While I told myself I just liked to write, at a subconscious level,  I was trying to bring together warring factions in our polarized community in the same manner I had labored in my practice to reconcile the feuding parts of a patient's personality.

To accomplish that goal, I tried to be even-handed, although I admit that sometimes, I lost my head and joined the fray. Recently, I decided to take a break after it finally dawned on me that I was still working, still chained to my desk, just substituting one job for another.

Now, having space and time in my life again, I have found myself returning to photography, another long-time passion of mine – and enjoying every minute of it. Right now, I'm in the process of trying to get juried into two upcoming exhibitions. 

At that point by chance –  although Carl Jung would call it synchronicity – I came across an article in the Boston Globe with an absurdly long title describing precisely what I was feeling and doing:  “The counterintuitive rewards of not being very good at something: Devoting ourselves to a secondary pursuit sparks flow in the work we consider our primary purpose.”^⁠1

This essay is by the prominent author Adam Gopnik who attributes his writing success to his secondary passion: his love of cooking – "the one that fuels all others." Of course, to liken myself to Adam Gopnik is like comparing a dog tick to a bald eagle. That's why I need to make clear I'm only comparing the role secondary passions play in our lives.

My primary passion for a long stretch of my life was psychotherapy: It has been my greatest honor and privilege to be allowed into another person's secret inner world, to team together to find a way out of their constricted, self-constructed maze. At the same time, my secondary passions were equally essential to my success, boosting my creative thinking and preventing burnout, working, as I did, primarily with patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from war and sexual abuse. 

Photography has always been my secondary passion, starting when I built a darkroom in my parent’s basement while a teenager. Writing, my other passion only appeared on my horizon when, as a returning Vietnam veteran, I was attempting to make sense of my feelings about the war and my country’s reaction to it.

For me, it is always such a rush when I create a photograph that stirs my soul or, when writing, to sweet-talk my words into an artful embrace. Gopnik expresses the euphoria this way:

“This moment, not of self-possession but of rapturous self-loss, is one of the strongest cognitive opiates human beings produce. There are many opiates available to inject into our veins; this is one that we produce ourselves and self-inject into our brains."

Gopnik compares this experience to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ’s concept of  “flow,“ a state, familiar to most of us, where we lose ourselves and find happiness in an all-absorbing activity.” Gopnik makes a key observation that this sensation is more likely to happen when pursuing our secondary passions,  not our primary one. Why is this?

For me, Shunryu Suzuki provides the answer: he was the Japanese priest who is credited with popularizing Buddhism in America. One can almost encapsulate his whole philosophy in his now, oft-repeated statement: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."^⁠2

What he is advocating is letting go of our preconceptions and, instead, cultivating an attitude of openness toward life. When you are a true beginner, your mind is empty and open. That's what my secondary passions do for me: Allowing me to become like a child again, seeing the world as full of possibilities.

It’s a good exercise to pursue, especially in these times when so many experts are predicting only doom-and-gloom.

xxx

¹ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/29/opinion/adam-gopnik-ingres-violin-creative-flow/?et_rid=1947323415&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter

² Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

The Donald Show

The exact origin of the God Emperor Trump character is unclear. On June 16th, 2015, an image of Trump's face photoshopped on to a Warhammer 40,000 soldier was submitted to 4chan's /pol/[1] board 
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1696628-god-emperor-trump

The Donald Show

Remember “The Truman Show,” the hit movie starring Jim Carrey about “a man who grew up living an ordinary life that—unbeknownst to him—takes place on a large set populated by actors for a television show about him.”^⁠1 

Everybody knew the truth except Truman, who was tricked into thinking it was real. We now have the opposite situation with our current blockbuster, “The Donald Show:” The star knows it is fake, but he has duped the rest of us into believing it is real.

Trump, the canny sideshow hustler, understands what the talking heads don’t: You dazzle your audience with a good story, not learned treatises or artful commentary.

As David Loy, a professor and Zen teacher, explains in his book, “The World is Made of Stories^⁠2,” we make sense of the world through stories: they “teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible.” In a word, it is by stories we make sense of the world. 

Telling stories is the life blood of Donald Trump.

Trump’s master story is that he is an outsider who doesn’t get the respect he deserves. It is a tale that can take you a long way. Just ask Rodney Dangerfield: it was the essence of his schtick.

It’s easy to be taken in by this particular story. Whether we admit it or not, we all feel like Rodney or Donald to one degree or another. Thump has built his whole political career on it, empowering not only himself but giving voice to millions across the country who feel victimized and under-appreciated. 

Donald has become their maestro, the master storyteller they tune into each night to discover the latest chapter in his saga – and theirs.

While Rodney provoked laughter in his audience at our foibles, Donald ignites anger and fear: Anger at the faceless “deep state” which has brought them to their knees and fear of the “godless, communist democrats,” who are lying in ambush, ready to finish them off. 

It is the classic plot of fairy tales and comic strips. The people cry out in their distress for a super hero, that one person who can save them by doing battle with their enemies. In westerns films, that is when Clint Eastwood rides into town.

In Donald’s fairytale world,  the super hero is, of course, himself, something he has regally proclaimed  since descending his golden escalator in 2016, vowing  to solve all of America’s alleged problems. How? Because of who he is: “I am your voice. I alone can fix it.” 

Of course, the idea that “one person could solve the myriad troubles we face today is absurd and deeply undemocratic, but one can understand the temptation to buy into that fantasy. It is a soothing fiction that someone will swoop in to save the day^⁠3, says Alison Danes, a professor of political science.

Danes talks about Donald’s fantasies while I talk about his fairytales. We are not alone.

A professor emeritus and fairy tale expert, Jack Zipes, agrees, “There is a fairy tale-like aspect to all his talk and presentation, because he wants to take charge of the narrative. Most fairy tales are stories about hope. Whether he does it consciously or not, Trump has found a way to narrate a story in which he is the star.”

But nothing lasts forever.

All shows have to come to an end, and “The Donald Show” is no exception. America has become exhausted by his nonstop bluster and litany of endless grievances. I predict he will soon get his just deserts, precisely as Hans Christian Anderson predicted in his fairytale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

While Trump, running for president again, is strutting around in his “perfect,” new-look finery – which is actually the same as his old – some brave Republican will summon the courage to finally blurt out the truth: The emperor is wearing nothing at all.

xxx

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show

^{2 2}David Loy, “The World is Made of Stories, page 3.

³ https://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/post/the-comedic-stylings-of-donald-j-trump

Something Snapped

 

CC Jean Stimmell: Ice breaking up on Exeter River (2017)

I was struck by a recent essay by Timothy Denevi in the NYT about the writer Joan Didion.^⁠1  On the surface, it seems strange that I should be so affected because Didion was a conservative supporter of Barry Goldwater and distrustful of the Kennedys. On the other hand, I am an unabashed child of the Sixties who, while growing up, was inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural address challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.^⁠2

Something snapped in me when Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, was assassinated: I  found myself sobbing uncontrollably as I watched the news unfold. His death was too much to bear: I see now it was the final straw, causing an irreparable rip in the fabric of America I had been taught to believe in.

Something snapped in Joan Didion, too, despite our differences. As RFK lay dying, his last words were, “Is everybody OK?”^⁠3

Neither of us was – along with a lot of other people.

It was the final blow in the sickening series of assaults on our image of what America stood for in the aftermath of the murders of MLK, Malcolm X, and President JFK, not to mention America’s massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and Charley Manson’s California killing spree.

It caused Joan Didion to have a mental breakdown, “an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,” for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant."^⁠4 As for me, recently back from the rivers of Vietnam, it completely unmoored me from the reality of what my country represented, catapulting me on a crazy drunken ride through the frenzied times that lay ahead.

Didion was a master storyteller detailing how the unprecedented changes of the 1960s caused America to fragment, according to  Michiko Kakutani of the NYT.  She questioned whether our nation would survive, quoting lines from Yeat’s famous poem: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”^⁠5

Of course, the center did hold – but at a high cost: The rabid polarization that divided us in the 1960s caused social fractures that didn't heal. Whereas previously, our nation was like a new puncture-proof tire guaranteed for 50,000 miles, we were now an out-of-balance retread, patched with distrust. 

“It turns out that Didion was also remarkably prescient in writing about the fracturing of truth as people increasingly filtered reality through the prism of their own prejudices”^⁠6  It was only a matter of time before these wounds reopened. And indeed, they have:  once again, we are living through times of chaos and uncertainty, contending with epidemics, insurrection, racial hatred, and mass shootings in our schools.

Yet this time around, I am too old to snap – only sag further. But with age sometimes comes wisdom, and in that spirit, I will suggest what has been lost: our sense of community – the linchpin that really made America great.

Again, I find common ground with Joan Didion: In an interview before she died, she acknowledged that folks “no longer count themselves as part of the community.” Too many Americans “didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.”^⁠7

One thing that would help revive our sense of community is mandatory national service. 

Here's an example from my own life I've written about before. On one occasion, my ship had a major crew turnover: almost a quarter of the crew was new. On our return trip back to the rivers of Vietnam, "all hell broke loose in a crude kind of diversity training, representing as we did, a cross-section of the nation: East coast, highly educated, college dropouts and midwestern kids who hadn't finished high school; hip city slickers and country folks right off the farm; We had Native American, Hispanic, and black sailors, along with staunch segregationists from the south.”^⁠8

At first, fights and animosity reigned, but we were thrown together in a situation where we had no choice but to work together: As we got to know each other, we learned that underneath, we were more alike than different. It was no love fest, but we came to respect one another. Most importantly, we had an overarching dedication to a common purpose, prompting us to do our jobs like well-oiled machines.   

Don’t mistake my example as an endorsement for war. The Peace Corps is a perfect example of mandatory national service. So is working in a  hospital, cleaning up after a natural disaster, planting trees, or pulling the detritus of our consumer society out of our dying rivers.

Joan Didion is right: Without a sense of community, things will continue to fall apart and, this time, maybe the center won’t hold.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion/joan-didion-mystery-rfk.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20230609&instance_id=94592&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=135085&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

² https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/Ask_not_what_your_country_can_do_for_you.pdf

³ https://www.10tv.com/article/news/nation-world/man-who-heard-robert-kennedys-last-words-when-he-was-teen-dies-california/530-7ced5556-644c-483d-8408-761dcacdd7e6

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/opinion/joan-didion-books.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

⁶ Ibid

⁷ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion/joan-didion-mystery-rfk.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20230609&instance_id=94592&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=135085&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

⁸ http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/2022/03/one-for-all-all-for-one.html

Down the Rabbit Hole

 

Down the Rabbit Hole

I wrote in my last column about the power of advertising to seduce folks into buying things they don't need. I foggily remembered reading a great description of why that happens. To refresh my memory, I dug out what had once been my bible, "Your Money or your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, written in the 1990s.^⁠1 Regrettably, over the years, I've let slide much of their advice about the advantages of practicing voluntary simplicity and living below your means.

The beginning of the book gives a brief history of how we sell things in America. During most of our country's history, we primarily bought only items we needed, but that changed when advertising came into its own in the 1920s. At that point, modern manufacturing advances became providing the products Americans needed at lower and lower costs. Having their needs more easily satisfied, workers instinctively began asking for a shorter work week and more time for leisure. It didn't occur to them to work longer to get things they didn't need.

As a result, economic growth started going down.

The tycoons of big business were apoplectic because their profit margins were suffering. Into the breach to save the day came modern advertising, based on a brand-new premise: while real needs are limited, the sky is the limit for our wants. This notion was incorporated as a mantra in Herbert Hoover's 1929 economic report, celebrating the discovery that when we satisfy one want, it makes way for another. "The conclusion is that economically, we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied."^⁠2

And so it came to be. We became a nation of consumers chasing each new want concocted on Madison Avenue. They have shown no mercy, pushing ever more absurd products to shrill. A perfect example is the campaign to sell us new beverages.

For tens of thousands of years, people had no qualms about drinking water for free from lakes and rivers and, more recently, right out of the tap. Unfortunately, by the time I was growing up in the 1950s, modern advertising had already made water obsolete. Coke and Pepsi were kings by the time I came around. But as we all know, that didn't last forever: The health craze came along and poisoned the soft drink well. 

Drinking water once again came back in vogue to appease the new god of hydration – but only expensive bottled water was deemed appropriate, not free water out of the tap. And so it stood, or so I naively believed, until I recently read about advertising's latest triumph in the NYT. Over the past decade or so, water-flavoring offerings have exploded across our country and the world.

I missed the trend because I was drinking beer.

This part of the ready-to-drink (RTD) beverage market has been skyrocketing, with sales increasing by 42 percent in the last three years. Globally, the RTD market is expected to approach $100 billion by the start of this year^⁠3. 

These water additive companies pitch their drinks —  often made with artificial sweeteners and flavorings — as a means to help people hit their hydration goals. “It’s Mary Poppins logic: A spoonful of (sugar-free coconut syrup) makes the (tap water) go down.”^⁠4 Yet it’s strikingly

 effective as one true believer, a history teacher from South Texas, confessed: she said going back to drinking tap water would feel like “drinking my own saliva.”^⁠5

In the opinion of this old Yankee curmudgeon, this advertising blitz is not a Mary Poppins' story: It is a bad trip from Alice in Wonderland, where corporate capitalism in cahoots with modern advertising is cajoling us to dive down the rabbit hole of insanity.

xxx

¹ “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin. Viking Penguin: 1992.

² Ibid. P. 16

³ https://www.bonappetit.com/story/beverage-aisle-gone-too-far

⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/dining/watertok-tiktok-recipes.html?action=click&algo=geo-bandit-all-surfaces-variants-diversify-time-cutoff-30&alpha=0.05&block=trending_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=638580452&impression_id=9998129b-f645-11ed-a843-55e77cff3a65&index=3&pgtype=Article&pool=published-assets-db-4-ls&region=footer&req_id=523806532&surface=eos-most-popular-story&variant=2_geo_engBandit

⁵ Ibid

We all like "time-saving" devices, but what are we saving time to do?

Fishing on Jenness Pond
CC Jean Stimmell

L. M. Sacasas is the author of an illuminating newsletter, The Convivial Society, tracing the intersection of technology, society, and morality. He states a well-known truth that the best way to sell new products in America is to advertise them as "time-saving." He follows that up with an unanticipated question: "What precisely are we saving time to do?" 

Most people have no ready answer.

Thinking about it, I believe the answer has changed over time. In the olden days, folks might say they would take their "spare time" as a chance to relax and enjoy leisure time. That might mean things like sitting on the porch in your rocking chairs watching the sunset with your spouse – and perhaps reflecting on the bigger questions in life, values you didn't get a chance to think about in the bustle of daily living.  

Nowadays, It's no longer enough for us to use our spare time to relax: now we must recreate (do recreation). We are told at every turn that we owe it to ourselves to make our leisure time more exciting and enjoyable – which, in America, requires spending money.

Casting my eye around any neighborhood confirms this observation: most yards are packed to overflowing with boats of all sizes, travel trailers, RVs, and commercial-sized lawn tractors, complete with all the accessories – with snowmobiles sitting forlornly off to the side from lack of snow.

All these toys cost big money to buy and maintain, requiring the owner to work more hours, not less, just to make the payments. Where's the time-saving in that? And what happened about finding the time to ponder the big questions?

People weren't as hooked on buying things to save time when I was growing up. I remember seeing my cousin fishing with his grandfather George every year during summer vacation. They were a fixture on Jenness Pond, bait-fishing for bass in their ancient wooden boat with a three-horse Johnson outboard motor. No movement, just sitting there hour after hour, one with the lake like Zen Masters.

George was intimate with the lake's topography, knowing the location of every submerged ledge, every underwater spring. He knew every inhabitant of the lake, their desires and proclivities, and how they interacted with each other in any possible weather condition. Locally, he was known as the bass guru.

Now fast forward to the frenzy on Jenness Pond today: 100 horse-power, streamlined bass boats flitting around the lake like predatory wasps guarding their nest. Catching bass was the natural result of George's profound knowledge of the lake and the foibles of the fish. To use the current lingo, George and my cousin were successful because of their deep "sense of place." They were wedded to Jenness Pond, while the modern intruders are married to their 30-thousand-dollar bass boats.

Sacasas is rightfully concerned that this quest for efficiency can rob us of our soul, reducing our lives  to “quantifiable outcomes and measurable outputs.” What we lose in this Faustian bargain is the essence of who we are: the particular ways we pursue our goals – “in the ways we are involved, invested, and engaged in the tasks that make up our days.”

As an alternative, Sacasas asks, what if we could view our tasks not through the lens of  cold-eyed efficiency but “as a means of keeping faith—with our neighbors, with our friends, with our family, perhaps even with ourselves?” And I would add, keeping faith with our little blue planet, the only home we have.”^⁠1

To my way of thinking, he has hit upon a root cause of the psychological and moral malaise our country suffers from today.

xxx

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹ https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/waste-your-time-your-life-may-depend

 

Why We Need Hands: A Rant

CC Jean Stimmell

Making things with your hands gets a bad rap today. It's so blue-collar. You're a failure if you don't go to college to get a white-collar job so you can lounge behind a desk. That's so wrong, I could scream!

To me, working with your hands is not only an essential aspect of being human but also one of the most joyous and uplifting. While I admit that a part of me has always been drawn to the philosophical and the abstract, that's always been balanced by a passionate need to work with my hands. The best example from my life is, perhaps, when I dropped out of sociology graduate school to establish a career building stonewalls for twenty years.

In a similar tale, Matthew Crawford writes about changing careers from a philosopher to motorcycle mechanic in his book, "Shop Class to Soul Class." Like me, he needed a physical practice "to serve as an anchor to the world beyond one's own head”^⁠1

Now, more than ever, we will all need a secure anchor to the physical to prevent being blown away by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a massive storm on our horizon. We will need our bodies if we expect to survive: They are the essence of what makes us human and our conduit to what's really real.

Biologically, we are living, breathing animals tethered to Mother Earth by sensitive, flesh-and-blood bodies. We also have exquisitely dextrous hands with opposable thumbs. But they can get us in trouble. Because of their tinkering, software engineers and their masters are concocting a brave, new world where we no longer need a physical form or worry about feeling pain – in other words, a world where we are like gods. 

However, if technicians successfully build this virtual world, we will find ourselves not free but captive, reduced to living in whatever world AI projects on our screen. We will forfeit all input, and AI will rule the day. Sadly, our new rulers can probably get away with enslaving us, as long as they continue to sedate us by streaming us irresistible series to watch.

There’s an existential danger here.

By falling victim to AI, we will be stripped of what makes us uniquely human. That's according to Carrie Barron, M.D. in Psychology today.^⁠2 She has found that creating or tending things by hand enhances mental health and makes us happy. She calls it a primal human need. Spending too much time on technological devices "deprives us of processes that provide pleasure, meaning, and pride."

She adds,“Making things promotes psychological well-being. Process is important for happiness because when we make, repair or create things we feel vital and effective. It isn’t as much about reaching one’s potential as doing something interesting–less about ambition and more about living.”^⁠3

Mathew Crawford also sees the eroding of manual skills as part of a much bigger problem: "a fundamental change in how we relate to our physical stuff. As consumers, most of us no longer make things, but buy them instead; we no longer fix things, but replace them." 

As a result, we become passive, dependent, and more easily manipulated. Our physical surroundings no longer hold our attention, and we succumb to what Crawford calls "virtualism" – "a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy."^⁠4 

I admit it: We humans are real pieces of work: quarrelsome yet endearing social animals, seemingly just bumbling along. Still we must not allow AI to harness our ineptness for high tech aspirations that will undoubtedly be highjacked by nefarious actors.

While we may appear incurable, perhaps we are part of an unfolding masterplan bigger than we can imagine. That’s according to the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Cardin^⁠5. He says that while we may act like children now, we are not just any children:  he envisions us maturing over time to fulfill a great role: to be the ones who reflect the consciousness of the universe.

 

Let’s not let AI sell us short.

xxx

¹ Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Matthew B. Crawford. Penguin ~ 2010

² https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/carrie-barron-md

³ https://www.psychologytoday.co..m/us/contributors/carrie-barron-md

⁴ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/working-hands-happiness-burkeman

⁵ https://philpapers.org/rec/TEITFO

 

Trauma and Trump

 

At the Vietnam Memorial during the Woman's March on Washington DC: 3/9/86
CC Jean Stimmell

I was taken aback when I heard she had written a new book. She had disappeared from sight over 30 years ago after a devastating injury. No, she wasn’t an old flame: I never met her, yet she has been a guiding light in my life. Her name is Judith Herman, M.D.

When I was on the rivers of Vietnam, she was launching a career that revolutionized how we understand psychological trauma, whether sexual or combat-related. As a  result, a woman is no longer automatically judged to be a slut or a liar if she reports being raped; and a soldier is no longer considered a coward if traumatized by war. 

After returning from Vietnam, I, too, disappeared for close to 30 years, finishing college and becoming a stone mason. Yet trauma was never far from my mind after what I had seen in Vietnam and, to a greater extent, what my high school veteran friends told me about their tours of duty, much more extreme than mine. It’s not surprising I have so many old friends who are veterans.  

Pittsfield is a rural, patriotic place that has always sent its young off the war. Out of my circle of acquaintances who served in Vietnam, two were killed, three seriously wounded, and two committed suicide, including a recon marine who had received a silver star for valor in combat. 

In my forties, my body rebelled against the stress, strain, and sun damage from lifting rocks shirtless under the hot sun. I went back to graduate school to become a psychotherapist. But no small part of my effort was to help my friends and myself figure out what had happened to us. That's when I ran across Judy Herman's groundbreaking book "Trauma and Recovery."

Herman's book was an indispensable resource, guiding me toward a career specializing in trauma. The first step in treatment, according to her, begins with a safe place and a trusted therapist to start piecing together a truthful story from shattered shards of traumatic memory; then, over the rest of treatment, assist survivors to "re-create the flow" of memory, transform the recollection, and mourn that traumatic loss."^⁠1

Herman’s new book, Truth and Repair, picks up where she left off thirty years ago,  arguing that trauma is better understood as a social problem, not an individual one. As trauma pioneer Bessel van der Kolk has written, “Herman brilliantly confronts us with another vital, but much ignored, aspect of recovery: social justice. Justice is an essential component for healing the godforsaken sense of humiliation and abandonment so central in traumatizing experiences.”

Herman's research has produced some surprises: when survivors of sexual trauma were asked what true justice would mean to them, they overwhelmingly looked for acknowledgment and amends from bystanders – rather than from offenders alone.

Herman explains that "these survivors "knew that many people in their communities enabled the offender's behavior, either by complicity or by inaction, or worst of all, by blaming the victim. This betrayal often hurts even more than the offender's crimes. To make things right, survivors needed the larger community to acknowledge their suffering and to take responsibility for making amends.^⁠2 “

I have to say, Herman's new book, appearing at this exact moment, seems like divine justice. That's because, right now, Donald Trump is defending himself against E. Jean Carroll's civil suit declaring he raped her. Meanwhile, seventeen other women await their day in court to tell a remarkably similar story of how they were assaulted by Trump.

Will Donald Trump finally be exposed as the serial sexual perpetrator he is? And, in a related matter, will he be held to account for disparaging combat veterans, many with PTSD? As just one example:

In a previously unreported 1998 interview with Howard Stern, Trump compared sex to going to battle in Vietnam: He claimed that because he slept with so many women during the Vietnam era, he faced a higher risk of dying from an STD infection than a soldier did from combat. For that sacrifice, he joked, he should be the one getting a Congressional Medal of  Honor.”^⁠3

In her first book, Herman wondered if anything would change. "The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly lead into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of  belief.”^⁠4 However, a new day is now dawning because of her seminal work.

I predict E. Jean Carroll’s suit against Trump will be a memorable turning point in history:  the beginning of a true restorative justice  movement where society validates and supports those who have been abused, slandered and discounted.

xxx

¹ https://notevenpast.org/trauma-and-recovery-by-judith-herman-1992/

² https://time.com/6262295/sexual-violence-survivors-justice/

³ https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/14/media/trump-stern-vietnam-stds/index.html

⁴ Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. Basic Books: 1992. Page 7.