“Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts of this.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Introduction: Solzhenitsyn (italics above) posed a, if not the most important observation regarding a free civilization’s survival when otherwise being threatened. Why is it that we don’t learn from our fairly well documented histories, and even more easily relearn the same lessons, to include conveying experience in a manner that consistently fosters congruity to intellectual evolution? Why do we fail from generation to generation to defend ourselves — our freedom to exist — until it’s nearly too late: Catastrophic extinction of an epistemological principles-defending organization, the ideological foundation it protects, a culture, or an ethnicity is at hand, or has already been concluded by a psycho-socio-economic dismantling of its multi-threaded identity, or through a final civilization-terminating genocide of the physical hosts?

Many ascribe those forms of survival-/protection-based learning failure to a kind of individual and collective sleep from which the masses have to be “wakened” before they can and will act to save themselves. Those same saving observers, then, posit their remedy on/with the concept that the referenced “sleep” is rationally chosen because of a polity’s lack of knowledge of the real truths pertaining to the matters being contested. Thereafter and from within this logic, “Wake up calls,” presented in the form of hopefully light-shining, epiphany-inspiring, non polemically researched, didactically-administered, real-truth-baring educational materials are needed to bring about the saving change. In that learning model, awareness of all relevant information, and thus the repeated selling of it through behavioral-/thought-competitive methodology and often even trauma-exploitative polemic activity, appears to be the first, if not only solution to the under-educated individual-to-masses sleeping consciousness disorder-phenomenon.

Regarding that notion of cognitive-based awareness’s having a panaceatic effect during presentation of existential level challenges, not so, I think; and particularly when trauma is perpetrated upon the entity, there’s more to it. Although awareness’s development is greatly helpful to trauma-influenced decision making — certainly that pertaining to sleeping in the face of trauma-causing danger, and particularly that which would be an existential threat — regarding cognition’s being the key to the affected entity’s learning its way out of sleeping and then to safety not only is sometimes ineffective, i.e., doesn’t always work, but the reliance upon just the rhetoric-winning, time-sensitive, evangelizing-for-critical-mass acceptance of the survival idea being sold can lead to cataclysmic failure. A nation can run out of time before the factually-reviving-through-brightness-bringing method can save both its country’s sleepy citizens and their self-governing structure from decimation, or more dramatically, annihilation.

Hence, in this — ascribed epistemologically to SHOM’s thought structure — thesis, inducing awareness through the otherwise logical method of sharing fact, for example, is not necessarily the panacea for Western civilization as many hope it will be. The most effective cure for this so called sleeping disorder is, instead, about removing those deleterious influences of trauma on individual and collective decision making that exist seemingly supra-naturally¹“Supra-naturally” refers here only to individual and systemic ontologically-locused — often out of range of awareness — traumatic influences on both individual and group thought, experience and behavior. and apparently irrationally super-powerfully to impede Enlightenment-styled applications of reasoned logical discussion administered otherwise prospectively, and protectively for good cause: intending to guarantee our survival.

Removing the above-referenced “deleterious influences of trauma“ can also have an intervening/undermining effect upon psychopathically-based predator political control — e.g., through application of terrorism — of individual and whole polity entities. The idea holds that uses of traumatic terror-creating behaviors function as perpetrator projection of inner-psych vacuity and other predator psychological shortfalls onto targets. When those projected traumatic effects upon targets are resolved, or otherwise reversed (expunged), so is the capacity for additional psychopathic projection to evoke its harm and relational controls.

In keeping with those SHOM concepts, this compendium of essays are also not written to “waken anyone” from his or her “sleep,” nor show how to resolve, reverse or expunge trauma within the ETM TRT SHOM detailed applications. Instead, the compositions serve as informational aids for those who’ve discovered SHOM’s application, or its proposal within the public arena, and want to know what it stands for and means, and how its application might affect the polity where the model is being implemented.

SHOM^™ stands for Strategic Human Ontological Management™, which is one of three components of the ETM TRT SHOM model. ETM is the acronym for “Etiotropic Trauma Management.” Its Etiotropically-focused²“Etiotropic” refers to problem solving that focuses upon the basis of a problem — core. That basis is referenced in the ETM TRT SHOM lexicon as Etiological; at the other end of core discernment lies symptomotology. Symptom-focused problem-solving enjoys the clinical expression, Nosotropic. principles and administrative guidelines provide the stratagems for applying Trauma Resolution Therapy (TRT) in psychologically-focused individual and familial clinical settings, and to limited sized extra-clinical environments like — small organizations — school districts, crisis management entities and etc. ETM counters the deleterious aspects of trauma’s systemic influences. TRT — applied in individual and group clinical settings — reverses or expunges incrementally, one incident at a time, that element of trauma etiology caused by a single source of trauma³See the Glossary for quick definitions of ETM TRT SHOM. See  “See the ETM TRT Tutorial’s Structured and Strategic; sections 1.a and 1.b, for detailed descriptions of “Sources of Trauma.” Also please see the ETM TRT SHOM website for management, professional clinical and patient discussions and descriptions of all matters pertaining to the application of ETM TRT SHOM.. “Sources” of trauma as defined in ETM are addressed also sequentially as well as incrementally — i.e., not as just one large morass of pain — until a client determines the resolution effort for the whole to be completed.

SHOM intends to extend ETM and TRT theory, methodologies and principles from their more clinically protected treatment settings to the admittedly lesser controllable public management sector. “Protected” means that both intrapsychic⁴Refers to internalized (as opposed to relational/systemic) psychological factors that influence perception, behavior, and the capacity to overcome or not destructive aspects of the particular consciousness being addressed. See the ETM TRT Patient and Professional Education Program for detailed descriptions of the intra-psychic variables and how TRT’s structure is designed and applied to circumvent those obstacles. and exogenous⁵“Exogenous” refers in this ETM TRT SHOM lexicon to elements (i.e., thought models or systems of logic, e.g., Behaviorism, psychoanalytical,  rational cognitive, and legal and illegal psychotropic medications) that intercede ETM TRT SHOM’s administrations such that the program’s goals cannot be achieved. See heading “3” referencing application of the ETM TRT module as it screens exogenous treatment interfering influences from the clinical activity. variables that have been shown to preclude achievement of individual patient/client/clinician agreed-upon goals of therapy are, otherwise, made ineffectual. Adversities that sabotage ETM TRT clinical progress, and for that matter most other clinical/management approaches to psychological trauma, are structurally and strategically⁶From the ETM TRT Professional and Patient Education Tutorial, see “At ETM TRT SHOM’s Core is its meaning to and of  “Structured and Strategic Psychodynamic.” screened out-of/from the, respectively, therapeutic/management endeavor. “Lesser controllable” infers that SHOM’s application in the public management sector can not be expected to produce the precise results as predictably efficiently as does Etiotropic Trauma Management within a controlled clinical environment — exogenous variables cannot be as readily screened during application of the public-based (SHOM) remedy, likely making it a more protracted administration. 

It is posited in this theory, however, that the strategic aspect of this prospective remedy can eventually facilitate with merit practicably precise — through incremental focus — address of those impediments to learning that feign sleep, i.e., clinically also called denial, and in doing so prevent individuals and groups from defending themselves against criminally-invasive, nation-dissembling management narratives/activities/under-the-radar-patho-controls, treasonous ideologues, occult-arranged and -deranged takeovers, and Stockholm syndrome-styled capitulations: exemplifying SHOM’s intervention intent upon such predator-contrived calamities before they befall. Summing the strategic goals of its ontological focus, SHOM intends to defend individual-protection-based organizational structures⁷Referring, and adhering to the American Constitution’s principles. against the patently facilitated mobs-gone-wild-modality’s, firstly with overthrow-motivated subversion via nihilization of the extant (traditional) organizational being, and secondly through implementation of the followup opposite, Totalism-embraced rule.

“Ontological Management” when used in the SHOM contextualization of trauma, refers to BCE Hellenist as primarily opposed to Hebraic and other spiritually interpretive conceptualizations and attendant methodologies with which to address matters pertaining to the soul. “Ontology” used here refers to one’s essence; it appears in virtually all literature to be represented in or by that soul. If an event does not go to and rift the core of human ontology, it is not considered in this work to be the level of traumatic experience for which the ETM TRT SHOM approach was designed, engineered, and thus intended.

The world’s religions have, in the main, and then combined with some secular prose and poetry (i.e., literature), provided ontological management for the previously and latter referenced category (e.g. Spiritual elements of the Hebraic and Oriental interpretations of the soul.), while a system of Western — which includes secular psych-clinical applications initiated and getting their groundings from within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — and sometimes Oriental⁸Generally referring to the logical-reasoning-behavioral elements of Confucianism in the East to aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in the Western Asian demography. logic and reason engage the former (Hellenist). Although the two renditions at times conflate in practice, ETM TRT SHOM attempt, assiduously, to do their works within the classical Greek intellectual formulation, and leave the Hebraic/Oriental spiritual elements of their treatises to those who’ve otherwise influenced, or been influenced by them over the related millennia. Moreover, there are times when the two paradigms don’t just roll temporarily into and onto each other, but their products — development of the entire psyche — become inseparable, fused, immutably merged; at such times the “attempt” becomes more challenging. I have published an overview of that epistemological styled definitional effort in order to clarify the meaning of this use of “attempt” (as applied to this SHOMBook), placing the expanded explanation in “Appendix F: SHOM Epistemology-to-Method regarding Traumatized Collective/Individual Cores, their Etiotropic Restorations, and as they Rationally Interface or Not with Competing/Clashing/Differing (both secular and non) Counter Perspectives.“

SHOM Theory vs. ETM TRT’s Applications

At the time of this writing, SHOM is theory designed out of ETM TRT’s individual and systemic applications otherwise applied in licensed clinical and extra-clinical circumstances between, officially, 1978 to extant.  We were in the process of creating and applying elements of SHOM when in 1996 the author was injured during maleofacial surgery. The injury, involving facial nerve damage, degraded into a fifteen year afront diagnosed by the Veteran’s Hospital in Albuquerque New Mex as Atypical Trigeminal Neuralgia. Since that time, the author’s health has precluded application of SHOM in practice and as a component of the professional educational process. Subsequently, SHOM theory was made available for review on the ETM TRT site, and now in this electronic presentation. A goal of those two documentations is to provide guidelines for applying the SHOM post this author’s active participations.

Additionally, SHOM is applicable to traumatized community based systems. For example it can be used to stabilize community managements affected by school violence, gang related incursions, disruptions and controls, and natural disaster. The sample application in this series of essays is specific to combating terrorism, asymmetric, or what formerly was called guerrilla styled war.

How is SHOM Supposed to Work against those who Contrive through Cause and, then, Exploitation of the same Trauma to Control, Manipulate and even Eviscerate not just Others, but the Civilizations to which They are Attached?

At inception of its application, and then continuing to its ending, SHOM organizes the entire management response to focus upon, to turn its intellectual analyses and tasking designations to, and thus provide remedy through an Etiotropic⁹To mean Etiology-focused/engineered, as opposed to Nosotropic¹⁰Symptom-focused problem solving lens and related helping solution. Although SHOM employs aspects of behavioral, cognitive behavioral and rational analyses to the helping effort, it only does so that none of those symptom-focused — again to mean Nosotropic-based — management methods encumber the Etiotropically-engineered SHOM effort. They are applied only — hence, the purposes, tasks, and incremental functions of ETM and TRT — so that they support it.

SHOM addresses two groups. The first is comprised of the perpetrator’s target(s). The second is to the perp itself. The latter address will only be effective if the former is applied correctly, and thus successfully.

A. Strategic Effects on Targets

From the moment an event is initiated, and occurring simultaneously with measures taken for keeping the hurt and still vulnerable alive, SHOM combats the intended psychological ramifications: chaos, disorder and contrivance to decimate a polity’s will to resist ideological takeover. Etiotropically map for inevitable removal, the cornerstones of the event’s purpose and the locations of the antagonists’ weapons’ still live psycho-ammunitions and other yet expended psychic ordinances. They are the traumatic event-implanted about-to-be explosions hosted post-event within the targeted psychs. This melee-to-be comprises or is embedded within the referenced individual and shared trauma etiologies, which when not addressed  continues to wreak individual and systemic thought/behavioral symptoms for some as if infinitely, and most often even without cognition/awareness.

SHOM identifies that perpetrator-caused trauma etiology as it occurs BOTH individually and systemically, and categorizes for future address the varying degrees of otherwise unrelenting influence as event-emanated concentric rings, each of which is comprised of similar intensities, and most notably shared as stored trauma etiology. For example, those who have survived a targeted violent attack have likely been more dramatically affected than, say, helping professional responders who although, too, are profoundly affected, were not as directly so. The physical targets represent one category of intensely established trauma etiology. For codification purposes, we’ve declaimed this trauma etiological grouping to be comprised of those who are a) Directly Affected.

At almost the same time, helping such targets of terror creates more, and as in this example another level of etiological influence affecting helping responders. Because their experience with the remains of blood and carnage is also extraordinary, we’ve referred to them as b) Second Directly Affected. And, if those responders arrive in time to become part of the event (physically fighting the perpetrators), they also become part of the grouping who have been a) Directly Affected. People still even further from this core or initial etiology, such as a media reporter or counseling clinician, pastor or friend who hear the story from responders, initial victims and even others who witnessed the event, also form another level of shared etiologies, likely not as intensely manifested as the traumatic event’s influences on directly affected victims, and then first and other multiple levels of responders. Through SHOM’s codification, this additional commonality of shared event-caused trauma etiology is called c) Indirectly Affected. This documentation of an event’s complete influences supports Etiotropic recognition and then most thorough address of the full etiological aspects of an event. 

As that etiology remains harbored within the minds of both individuals and groups, the multiple etiologies produce apparently — to mean from the views of third party objectifiers — aberrant, hysterical, and particularly where perpetrator contrived, thoughts and behaviors that tend mostly to not only advance themselves AND the stored trauma etiologies, but also the existences of the perpetrators causing the damage/destruction/harm in the first place.

As in the categorizations of implant-like levels of trauma etiology, SHOM also recognizes three categories of overarching changes in mass thought/behavioral adaptation to traumatic events exploited by the offending opposition so as to eventually control the affected target population. They are, and reduced here to give the reader a general idea through simplification:

1. About a third, let’s suggests here, of the targeted polity deny the etiology, its hysterical thought and behavior symptomatology, and in the end the event itself.
2. Another third, or usually less, change sides to become allied with the perpetrator, in the process supporting, aiding and even within the most bizarre presentations, loving it — for awhile, the world has referred to this phenomenon as “Stockholm Syndrome.”
3. And a final third, or thereabouts, fight back against the perpetrator — with intent to end an opposition’s aggrandizement and secure/maintain the targeted reality existing before the attack ensued, and particularly its hosting physical bodies.

Rather than trying to interdict and then didactically enjoin with rhetoric those often repeating presentations with behavioral and rational cognitive entreaties to not act that way — to mean hysterically or supportive of the entity trying to control/kill everyone — SHOM is intended to employ ETM TRT for drilling down into the individual and shared etiologies comprising the referenced differing levels of intensity (Directly Affected, Second Directly Affected, Indirectly Affected), one individual at a time, but with a component of the application expanding from the individual focus to a collective one. That is, when reversing or expunging one etiology within the mass of its also collective influence, the Etiotropically-structured strategic activity effects the whole into a direction of Etiotropically engineered and facilitated relief similar to that experienced by the individual. SHOM’s goal: incrementally expunge all of the trauma etiology otherwise intended by the antagonists to prevent the affected entities from defending themselves.

Traumatic symptoms, i.e., the referenced compensating (and also decompensating) thoughts and behaviors cannot exist without an etiology. And when it disappears, little to nothing remains of the person-psycho-skewing-device that would otherwise have supported the perpetrator. Its methodology dries up, becomes impotent. So also, then, goes the perpetrator. The dimensions of denial and, worse, Stockholm Syndrome’s plagues upon the culture and politics of the targeted polity are no longer needed. Thereafter, less trauma-etiology and -symptomatologically encumbered, the once psycho-targeted peoples can protect themselves, to mean fight for control of their lives, and for their existences. ETM TRT SHOM has been designed over this nearly past half century to conclude the application of terrorism as the hegemon’s psycho-takeover-weapon of choice.

B. Strategic Effects on Perpetrators 

Generally speaking and despite their following, adhering to, or taking orders from cultic organizational directives, perpetrators, that is to mean people who cause trauma for the purpose of manipulating targets — or otherwise conquer them — also express that strategy as projections of internalized/repressed traumatic consequences, or shortfalls in neuromolecular functionings (such as biologically-based psychopaths and drug addicts). Seeing the contrived event’s influences on targets, some of which are described in the preceding section (A.) strengthens their beliefs in and actual psycho controls of targets. Perps play those apparent and real controls of targets through understanding, realization, and notion that the controls will always achieve, at least in the long run, the goals inherent in the rationale for use of the modality’s application. They are to destroy the target’s will to fight, divide/pit the target against itself, and create a hystericallity encumbered defensive response.

All of that is reliant upon the traumatic etiology’s continuance. It can last weeks, months, years, even decades.

Expunging trauma etiology does not then just help those who comprise the target, but it intervenes on the perp’s projections. When expunging, reversing or otherwise ending the targets’ etiologies, the terrorist’s (also in SHOM called Offensive Trauma Managers or OTMs) projections, drawing much of their senses of power, and thus effectiveness, from the targeted’s weaknesses caused by that etiology, will lose its source of manipulative influence, and even be turned back upon the perpetrator. Instead of growing in strength by feeding off a target’s trauma etiology, the OTM not so nourished by the pain and life disruption will decompensate, as drug addicts and alcoholics declaim is the turning point — e.g., hitting bottom — from insanity or just loss of life’s controls and beginning recovery of appropriate functionings. Thereafter, perpetrators will abandon the use of trauma as a manipulator of its opposition. The methodology becomes obsolete. At least would say the leading philosophers of Al Qeada, Dr. Zawahiri and the late Osama Bin Laden.¹¹See The Al Quaeda Reader; the Essential Texts of Osama Bin Laden’s Terrorist Organization, 2007, by Raymond Ibrahim. Paraphrased, Al Qaeda’s authors say, “If terrorism doesn’t benefit Islam, it’s a no go methodology.”

ETM TRT SHOM, and its professional, patient, and community education programs have been available for online review¹²The ETM TRT SHOM site is located online at http://etiotropic.com since the Internet’s inception in 1993, and before that in pre Web formal academic¹³The ETM School was taught as the advanced component of the Chemical Abuse Counselor’s Course at the University of Houston between 1985-1990. A consolidated one week version of the course was presented between 1990-1997 in most University of Texas schools from the Rio Grande Valley, to El Paso, to Dallas, and to Houston. Other joint academic and clinical professional programs sponsored the one week presentation throughout the South West from Nevada to Louisiana. Elements of ETM TRT SHOM theory were presented between 1979-1985 in thirteen academic and government supported conferences throughout the State of Texas. and professional development¹⁴In the overview of the ETM TRT SHOM site, see . . . training from 1979. Where the referenced include professional, patient and public level tutorials, books and other descriptive work which detail all aspects of ETM TRT SHOM, this page describes SHOM’s more important purposes, why this specific blog has been created as an online book, an overview of the author (me), and the conventions used in the essays comprising the effort.

SHOMBook is a series of essays being written in real time as a theoretical application of SHOM to real events: the rise of Islamic State (ISIS) since June, 2014. When completed, the essays will be compiled as a single electronic book. It will, I hope, serve as a more realistic, but still somewhat academic description of the model’s recommended application. Through this proforma, I wish the stress of the world’s reality during this beginning of the twenty-first century to show through the otherwise standardized application of SHOM’s principles.

Demographic and Geneological Biases? SHOMBook’s author’s, my, biological ancestry is comprised of five generations Scottish-to-American/Texan, and before that thirty generations Scottish highlander ancestry: Campbells of Argyle, the fourteen years old surviving son of parents murdered for giving medical aid to the losing side following the 1746 Battle at Culloden.¹⁵The orphaned boy, also grandsoned to both Argyle’s James Campbell — fourth son of the eighth Earl — and the Lord Privy Seal (England – 1686), Sir Thomas Wharton, would serve as Coronet to Lieutenant in the Royal Dragoons, and eventually emigrate to America, landing at Philadelphia, PA in 1760. He would take the “Collins” name in honor of his mother (who was a “Collins”) also slaughtered at Culloden, and because the Brits looked unfavorably upon him for killing his Dragoon unit Commanding Officer in a duel, otherwise noted to be legitimate. While Wharton was serving in another location, back home the CO had compromised the lieutenant’s sister who had also, along with her older brother, survived Culloden. She died thereafter, apparently due to the shaming experience. Although Lt. Thomas Wharton had dispatched the senior officer in the fair fight, the British military hierarchy still frowned on the matter, resulting in my grandfather’s coming to America in that earlier time. Such is the likely archtypical prejudice — assuming longer-term historic demographic and genealogical influences attend/support some aspects of perspective — of the world at large.

SHOM Intents, Purposes, Functionalities and Hopes —

Institutionalize extension of Etiotropic Trauma Management’s theory and application principles into the global with the intent to end the strategic use of criminal violence for political advancement, whether manifestly harbored in the streets of a local community, or in the hearts, minds and activities of a world revolution; correct a trauma-caused/-inspired/-perpetuated civilization, group, or other systemically-/collective-based learning disorder¹⁶To mean “group think” gone pathological, bizarrely irrational, incongruously manipulative, self destructive, and homicidal, or even Machiavelli; or Behavioral-to-systemic (BS); or framing it another and more simplified way, referring to mob hystericallity of thought and behavior.. 

Using comparison, this section categorizes three SHOM salients.

The first and SHOM’s epistemological raison d’etre, offers a strategic managerial local-community-to-national-to-international means for concluding innocence-targeting criminal violence contrived to achieve political outcomes. That is and reiterating for emphasis, I’ve designed Strategic Human Ontological Management to — primarily Etiotropically* — bring criminal violence, and particularly that caused for achieving political goals, to an end.

Second and subsequent to establishment of SHOM within a democracy/republic, I’ve created/engineered it to answer the questions begged by Solzhenitsyn’s oft quoted rhetorical refrain posted below the title to this chapter; “Why do you think it’s like that, especially when there is so much intellect available to help us learn from the past, from history — to show us the way?” And, strengthening the perplexity, “Can we even do anything about it if we DID understand why?” SHOM then offers an ideological, methodological and managerial both answer and fix. They include a theory and management application that systematically defends against one of the great sources of this most otherwise apparent learning failure. It is the millennia old bête noire of democracies/republics and other fairly consensually managed societies, or even only little groups — the always prospectively learning disorder-based system-crashing anomaly that Burke¹⁷Edmund Burke, “The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.” Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue, Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, Adams¹⁸John Adams, Letter, 1815, From Adams to Jefferson  — “We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power … All projects of government, formed upon a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, and virtue, firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions … The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.”, and Madison¹⁹“In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.” The Writings of James Madison: 1819-1836; by James Madison, edited by Gaillard Hunt, 1910 presciently called, and then de Tocqueville²⁰Alexis de Toqueville {sic}, 2012-03-07, Democracy In America, Volume 1 {of 2}, Chapter XV, Tyranny Of The Majority, Annotated + Illustrated, Kindle Locations 5287-5289. recorded nearly a half century following studied establishment of their recommendations for government, the Tyranny of the Majority.

Trying to understand and remedy it, those originating social management views relied upon observations of that which some founders and other authors/philosophers/revolutionaries from the times all described as power infected “natural human” propensities toward faulty character. Power, particularly when absolute, corrupted otherwise apparently ordinary, albeit sometimes also weak, people. In SHOM theory, however and again, there’s more to it. Power gone amuck results not just from such generalized frailties knocked down to “mob behavior,” or to an even lesser extent only group think fomented hystericallity, but in demonstrable part from a delineable systemic traumatic condition. It is so pronounced that it even impedes current collective interactive, intergenerational, institutional and, then, civilizational learning — traumatic survival initiated pursuit of power distracts an entity’s leadership from doing its primary job, and thus learning from the meaning it would otherwise have attained.  Hence, although there may be a loud and genuine attempt to pass on the “experience of life,” as Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, it may not be heard or even felt by his edification efforts’ intended recipients: the newly, systemically and almost always ongoingly traumatized.

Rule of law, culturally influencing entreaties to abide good character, religion, and structural balances of offsetting power configurations — to include development of problem awareness through unfettered expression — otherwise engineered to be stanchions against the power-enthused/-driven majority’s both prospective and sometimes actual trauma inspired deleterious influences on the self governeds’ learning efforts, are not enough. By themselves, those otherwise exemplary additions to self rule cannot withstand the trauma imposed systemically occurring impediments to both the individual and collective learning elements attending decision making and other problem solving activities. So SHOM not only provides a theory and remedial application that DOES withstand the referenced adversities, but removes their instigating psycho-social cores as well. Should this endeavor be successful, the referenced institutions would be strengthened in their interactions with their polities.

The point? Pull the plug on individual-to-collective trauma and take the “tyranny” — the hypnotic effect of power’s aggrandizement just for its sake — out of majority rule; and not only strengthen the various leaderships’ interactives with their followers, but also make stronger the self governing polities’ capacities to learn from their histories. 

A third SHOM salient intent and purpose is to institutionalize a soundly congruent methodology for more directly — e.g., as opposed to an amorphous address by an almost always conflictually operating and thus sometimes malfunctioning mental health apparatus — pulling the referenced plug. That is, SHOM is also intended to provide the large community, nation, or civilization perspective and tools for, and as an adjunct to, the Etiotropic*-based trauma management model referenced below and included throughout this series of essays.

*“Etiotropic”, which is the primary subject of ETM TRT SHOM professional training, patient and public education documentation, and related activities²¹See ETM TRT SHOM Publications and the overall site., means to focus interpretation and management problem solving on etiology, which refers in a general usage to the “source or core of a problem.” In this theoretical management application to publicly affected systemic trauma, etiology points to the specific elements of bio-psychological destruction that directly relate to the base of the matter, whether locused in individual or collective memory, or both²²When using “etiology” in this book’s essays, instead of limiting its application to medical/psychological matters/applications, I intend it to refer here to a level of managerial problem source that when it and the consternation for it have been successfully addressed, to include having been identified and expunged from the milieu of pains and sufferings attending this matter, there won’t be anymore presenting and linked difficulties: in this case, to mean Islamic terrorism or even jihad. The axiom that you can’t have behavioral symptoms — repeatedly imposed heinous death contrived for political effect — without an etiology pertains to this matter about terrorism, as well. ²³More on trauma etiology in the Glossary and Neurobiology of Psychological Trauma Etiology and Its Reversal with Etiotropic Trauma Management.. Summarizing that perpetrator-forced bio-psych change upon targeted individual and collective realities, devastating events are contrived to place pre trauma long-term potentiated synaptic storage of value, image and other realities comprising existential elements of identity into neuro-molecular extinction. Until completed, the lack — manifesting psychosocially as loss and its resolution — simultaneously initiates positive survival activities (defensive fighting) and, conflictually, encumbrances to those and related decision makings. That individual tug-of-war inevitably produces mob-like hysteria also controllable, to mean manipulable by externally presenting intrigue: outside or otherwise warring entities, narratives, ideologies, cults, etc. 

As a managerial conceptualization, “Etiotropic” is often better understood when juxtaposed to its opposite: the Nosotropic approach to problem solving. “Nosotropic” means to focus on individual and collective behaviorially-presenting symptoms of the etiology. We have justice pursuit, some religious, managerial media and clinical rational-cognitive, Behavioral-based institutions to address those symptoms. Through rigorous critique, they evaluate for and then impart to the recipient being helped/punished etc., what’s behaviorally/culturally incorrect, or at least inappropriate regarding their activities, and then show how to otherwise respond properly. To take several of many available examples of trauma induced etiology’s symptoms, they can present as intellectual hysteria, delusion, and denial that can extend even to mob chaos as natural thought/behavioral ramifications of trauma etiology.

SHOM’s differentiation of etiology from symptomatology has significant ramifications for public trauma management. The former exists in human ontology, which includes more, albeit passionate, also passively static, and thus not as frequently changing, identity and, traditionally, spiritual elements of the psych. And although not popular to admit it when interacting with or within Behavioral Management-based — again Nosotropically-focused — epistemologies, expunging etiology is required to mitigate if not completely reverse the systemically traumatized entity’s condition as a whole. Trauma symptoms cannot exist without the trauma’s etiology. Remove systemic trauma etiology, that which undergirds public hysteria, restore system/public order, and simultaneously strengthen stabilization efforts against attempts to disrupt and exploit it.

Heretofore ETM TRT SHOM’s invention, conflicts between Nosotropic and Etiotropic focused models/methods were not easy, if even possible to overcome. Ontologically constructed methods, e.g., Analysis, Client Centered and many theological applications were seen as too etherial, impractical because of time constraints put on by task-based managements, and lacking in what has been argued by hoping-to-be-more-objectively-valid empirically-based evidentiary measures of effectiveness. The search for the referenced “plug” or trauma etiology was not acceptable to, say, the workplace. 

Moreover, simultaneous focus upon that unstructured ontological approach tended (and still does) to pit the Behavioral epistemology against  the lesser delineated unstructured etiology reversal one. As described in this book and all ETM TRT SHOM professional, patient, and publication educational materials, Etiotropically focused trauma remedies threaten perceptions and actual clinical and management control by Behaviorists to the extent that the latter sabotage the effort of the former. That happens when trauma etiology is redefined by the Behavioral paradigm to be aberrant behavior, which is otherwise defined in the Etiotropic conceptualiztion as only the symptoms of the trauma-caused problem. Overcoming the referenced conflict is done easily, or at least more readily when ETM TRT SHOM’s strategic components of its structured application are administered. They preclude extra-modality interference whatever the alternative epistemology.

Why SHOMBook? It provides a theoretical example of how SHOM would be applied to a real life situation.

Managers of Western societies have traditionally been produced out of the various disciplines, professions and advocations contributing to its formation and operation. For example, lawyers, educators, medical personnel, entertainers, political activists, journalists, psychologists/psychiatrists, economists, philosophers, the clergy and many differing kinds of scientists bring their trainings and perspectives to the challenge. In this effort I’ve added trauma managers, particularly from the Etiotropic theory and application, to weigh in on those matters where violence against innocence is contrived and applied to advance one political group over another. Having done this work at psychological trauma treatment center and local community levels for a while, nearly four decades, I’ve come to realize that I see current events and changing times, and violence-related social problems and their prospective solutions both somewhat and considerably differently from the other referenced disciplines. Although not politically trained or skilled, I nevertheless created this information blog-like electronic book to add this other view to the discussion regarding how we manage ourselves when faced with both likely and actual harm.

Moreover, this work describes how formal trauma management, again in particular and significantly Etiotropically engineered and applied trauma management (ETM), can and should be used by open political systems to strengthen the definition, pursuit, defense and maintenance of Western-styled, and emphasizing the American form of, freedom. Reiterating for emphasis, “Etiotropic” means to focus  management activities — analysis, definition, decision making, and its interpretation — upon the source, core, or (speaking synonymously, but from another word venue) etiology of a problem, as opposed to addressing its consequences or  symptoms.

Within those contributions, this book, additionally then, conveys my analyses and opinions of trauma management related current affairs also seen through an, albeit Etiotropically engineered, still more globally-focused lens. That is a must, as some of the stressors we’ve encountered locally originate from within that greater environment. And with the opposite being true, too — individually experienced trauma, e.g., the thought/behavioral consequences (PTS symptoms) of intergenerationally occurring familial alcoholism, drug addiction, child sexual abuse, spousal and child battering, rape and homicide-/suicide-caused trauma being first skewed into hystericallity²⁴This usage refers to the meaning of “hysterical” referenced in the ETM TRT SHOM Glossary., then spun or otherwise projected out and onto the ever broadening repository of narratives forming eventually as perpetrator takeover ideologies, epistemologies, philosophies and methodologies of, inevitably and exemplified by, cult-driven “1984”²⁵Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell, USSR 1917-1991, and Islamism styled social calamities.

And finally, the book provides a sample — theoretical — SHOM’s specific application to the United States’ engagement in the ISIS/Al Qaeda/Boko Haram/Generic Extremism/Islamism War initiated, albeit some time ago, most dramatically recognized in and by the heartland in the summer of 2014. That change in levels of awareness began and has continued to occur, and although they’ve taken others’ lives, as a direct consequence of the genocidal killing of the Christians who have inhabited Mosul, Iraq for the previous nearly two millennia; to this moment, that killing of an otherwise innocent aspect of humanity is, without hyperbole, sweeping across the world.

A More Difficult Circumstance — From Asymmetric Challenges to Full out War

As different from SHOM’s original engineering²⁶SHOM, as a developing extension of ETM TRT was designed beginning in the 1970s-80s primarily to counter guerrilla or terrorism strategies being applied by smaller forces than the ones otherwise available to the United States. for the address of what recently has been called asymmetric-, and earlier was termed guerrilla-styled hostilities, SHOMBook applies principles of ETM TRT SHOM theory to a current and as might be said fuller war, depending on from which location within the allied global the observation is being made — it is growing quickly into set piece battle prospects and actualities. I’ve adapted that seemingly lesser urgent and originating application of SHOM to the current (2014-2015) challenges. I’ve not seen any aspect of it represented in American defensive strategy; and the situation in which we are finding ourselves can and from this view become even more dramatically threatening — rising to existential-level recognition even by the most proportionate-response-control advocates — in a very short period if SHOM’s national defensive principles are not adopted, and the remedies recommended herein employed.

The rapidity with which the challenge advances itself, and the prospects for even that to be hyped, requires that I weight the rational cognitive and behavioral, also combat recommended, components of SHOM more heavily than the ontological address, at least at the beginnings of this effort. That makes the overall book’s presentation appear polemically political. And it may even actually be that way.²⁷See “Taking the Bait . . .” in this series for a disclaimer regarding the necessity of polemics when considering differences/similarities attending clinical applications influencing American foreign policy and the use of force. But despite that appearance and any attendant realities, the essence of the (SHOM) program is still strategic ontological management. Its contribution becomes more manifest as we proceed through the always serious obstacles that threaten to derail our efforts.

But in trauma management of combat forces, all is not smooth and easy, nor in particular linear. When combatants are exposed and re-exposed, say at fairly close intervals like back-to-back, to continuingly assured traumatic events, as occurs in world war and the like, the individual combatant’s system of protections — to include denial, minimization and so forth — are constantly required, often even between tours. As the expression has gone during both the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, the “War,” referring here to the combatants’ emotional experiential processing attending the influence — periodic passages into and through more protected sanctuaries like home — of safe zones, begins when the fighter returns home. Although some of those passages could be processed intellectually, and for some even emotionally while still in theater, the feeling component can be felt more strongly in that safer setting, where the more seriously constructed defenses earlier required to achieve the battle tasks are not now thought to be so needed. Banging into constant exposure necessitates stoic defense through discipline, strengthening of interlocking protective relationships with near associates — those partners helping to hold the combatant line — pride in one’s whole unit and functionings, the calling upon internal stamina and courage, which in multiple exposures only goes so far in even the best of the otherwise truly stalwart. In guerrilla/asymmetric war, long lapses of calm provide a sense of return to some state of normalcy, before it is again  impinged upon by the offensive trauma management (OTM) method, i.e., the terrorism application component attending the sporadic exposure. And THAT interval of calm for the psych provides the OTM with its modality as a major tool for conducting its side of the war. Trauma bombards the psych in waves offset by periods of illusory safety. All of that experience is then retained in memory as sequelae that erode both individual and systemic (unit) performance over time.²⁸see Guerrilla War’s ─ Terrorism’s ─ Pathogenesis and Cure, Assuming the practical application to combat trauma of ETM TRT SHOM. TRT application during the troughs can mitigate the systemic effects without impinging too greatly on the defenses needed to fight when the attacks come again.

Hence, applying ETM TRT SHOM, and particularly the TRT component within the constancy of traumatic exposure during repeated combat has to be done with an awareness by the ETM TRT SHOM clinician/manager of the differences attending the new challenge presenting through its application to the fuller war. And, therein lies one important rationale for my writing this book as support for SHOM applicants, who later can see herein an example of the differences. 

Author

I am Jesse W. Collins II. Before changing careers to this trauma management profession in the 1970s, I trained academically at the University of Texas at Austin and worked professionally in the fields of accounting, corporate finance, and investment banking. Earlier, I served as a Marine during the 1960s, participating in the Vietnam War, and then establishing defenses and offensive tactics, particularly anti-guerrilla ones, against actual and prospective hostiles. In conjunction with founding and operating — as the chief executive officer with final clinical responsibilities for all health care applications — a chain of government licensed²⁹Our multi-facility government licensing was a first in that era and JCAHO managed facilities, and then providing community services, I developed ETM™ (Etiotropic Trauma Management™), TRT (Trauma Resolution Therapy™), and SHOM™, and authored all related/supporting pamphlets, books, essays, articles and clinical and professional management training materials and schools. With them, we constructed a psychotherapists/manager training and certification program, eventually hosting and then providing professional supervision to approximately twenty-five hundred  clinical counselors and crisis managers of all types. That information, the details of which include author history, background, credentials, model development, vetting, and etc., is available at the primary ETM TRT SHOM™ website. Although encumbered by incapacitating health for a significant period (1996-current), the total referenced trauma management effort has been formally clinically and managerially ongoing for approximately thirty-eight years, and draws from a half century’s experience with psychological trauma’s individual and systemic effects occurring in both civilian and military combat environments.

Conventions

For making these presentations, I have identified, categorized, named and use three extra — not everyone uses them as do I — conventions. Given a named identity here, they are

1. “Chirp™”,
2. “Grassrootists™,” and  
3. “Linear vs nonlinear trauma management.”

Chirp™

The first convention, “Chirp™,”³⁰“Chirp” is a technical and framing conceptual approach for presentation of expression within or on the Internet is the one I’ve used for adapting this SHOM story to the Internet. Chirp™ is summarized in the notes, which are attended by a link that takes you to a fuller description in the glossary. It supports all ETM TRT SHOM online essays.

Here are the most pertinent excerpts from that more detailed description.

What is Chirp?

“Chirp” denotes the communication change adopted in response to the Internet’s influence on expression. Several stages and phases (shown in the “Glossary” rendition of this excerpt) hallmarked the era from early development to its currency, which at the time of this delineation is 2014. Chirp has been in transition, that is transforming itself, since its inception.

Chirp’s Primary Purpose — Convention or Meaning

The primary purpose of Chirp™ is to convey within the cyber-electronic setting the presenter’s/author’s meaning, and to do it as accurately as possible. To understand that purpose’s relative value, on the one to ten scale, English or, say, Arabic grammar, spelling, paragraph, theme construction and other well formed conventions used in the former print media would rate an eight, and conveying meaning accurately would get the one rating. Moreover, one would be best. Ten would be the worst, or maybe just less important.

Additionally, Chirp™ exist outside of branded and managed commercial social media paradigms. They impose epistemo-ideo-methodo-logical bias and censorship on expression that free and unfettered expression does not support. 

Summarizing: As goes the Internet toward freedom of expression, so goes Chirp™.  

Grassrootist and Semi-Grassrootist

The second convention is the identifier I’ve given to the group recognized by Walid Phares as a “self educated public.” He emphasizes that academia’s once more traditional mid east studies programs encompassing the West are now funded in some part by the constituency being studied.³¹Phares, Walid, 2014-12-09. Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America, “Ideological Jihad: Intellectual Penetration”, (p. 139). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition. Either coincidentally, conveniently, or likely, those programs appear to do bias work, when otherwise pretending to be non polemically underpinned. Turning into political expression, it then influences public management — government — policy, which in turn, circuitously supports jihadists, referring to the help provided by groups like the Wahhabis. Compensating, the actual publics, themselves, which I have coined  here as “grassrootists” out of respect for their courage in filling the void created by the possible, if not the appearance of, mass professional misfeasance, have sought and provided information that is not as likely — to mean not funded by the studied subjects — to be obviously contaminated education.

The referenced prospectively compromised are sometimes called “apologists.” Generally speaking, the “self educated public” consists of a group of writers, researchers and apparent thinkers who are labeled “non apologists.” The latter, non apologist, appears to serve as a revolutionary kind of corrective counter to the former. I’m assuming that the contributions by those latters are only a temporary phenomenon, and that the global need or wont for them will dissipate when the footnoted and referenced funding matters work themselves out. Grassrootists can return to ordinary life, then, instead of doing professional educators’ jobs for them. That is, I would think we can go back to relying upon their work as soon as they become credibly dependable, again. But then, maybe education as we’ve known it is about to go through a transformation/reformation, and this self educated public or grassroots thing is just one of the sparks reflecting, or initiating, that change.

Although I think, analyze and write from a unique perspective, that is, a SHOM-based Etiotropic Trauma Manager’s view of such demanding and encumbering subjects as violence, criminal harm, guerrilla warfare, perpetrator intervention and target/victim management and treatment, I’m temporarily satisfied and even quite proud at times to be a grassrootist, too, when it comes to the study of such additional, demanding and for most encumbering subjects as collective oriented criminal political violence, contrived harm for one group’s advancement over another, terrorism-styled perpetrator intervention, and, say even foreign affairs, genocide, anti-massive-cult managerial controls, and the like. Heretofore, I’ve always been glad to leave the address of those additional and mostly politically inspired matters to the proper authorities. And then as a fairly passive grassrootist, I’d turn all responsibility, excepting my vote for the particular leadership to the group in the know. I look forward to getting back to that model.

In the mean time, and because I have a foot in the professional and guerrilla warfare disciplines, my study of Islam, the Hard Left, and the bureacracy of foreign affairs management has placed another in mostly grassrootists territory. Hence, SHOMBook’s byline: “a Semi-Grassrootist.” 

Linearal vs Nonlinearal (NL) Trauma Management/Problem Solving

The third convention codifies differences between linear and nonlinear³²Linear vs nonlinear management concepts as applied to the address of politically exploiting criminal violence, and thus trauma, are described in the glossary management problem-solving as they pertain to this blog’s subject and presentation style. Where on this page and in this section the language used adapts more readily to the public’s professional social managers, for example, legal, educational, social worker, political science professionals and the self educated public — grassrootists — the glossary referenced through link therein provides the additional detail in a language more often used in clinical environments. 

That style, then and in turn, reflects ETM TRT SHOM’s overall educational approach. It is to consider and then actively address the criminal violence-inspired matters with a blended clinical and social management effort and lexicon that incorporates the integrated use of both the linear and nonlinear tools. However, because the nonlinear component, which is most often applied in the lesser known, understood, and discussed clinical environment, is seldom part of the public solutions-finding dialogue, I’ve emphasized its application through the strategic means otherwise delineated as SHOM.

Summarizing the referenced glossary’s (notes) more detailed explanation, psychological trauma affects individual and systemic decision making nonlinearly, which effect, itself, has continuous both causal and consequential outcomes. They divide the pre trauma causing event and otherwise traditionally linear oriented control aspects of a psych comprising the targeted entity such that it becomes pitted against itself. Responding strategically managerially/educationally, then, and to emphasize also the application of nonlinear methods where appropriate, can, does and will re sustain (back to its normal functioning) that decision making which has been adversely influenced by those activities so contrived for that disrupting/undermining/disillusioning purpose.

When such things as attacked-polity massive denial, Stockholm syndrome, usurpation of will to fight play critical roles in collective decision making relative to solving the problems of political perpetrator contrived/caused/manipulated/exploited trauma — as those bête noires of survival (as seen after having gotten through it) do in almost every instance of their manifestations — full problem solution cannot occur without the defensive applications of both management constructions: linear and nonlinear. Linearally-focused debaters/fighters/warriors are required through methods like public awareness development, and even combat by the viscerally rigorous, to buttress the existential-defending limits keeping psych-trauma-exploiting perps at bay, or at least slowing them down, and the attacked entity alive. Simultaneous strategic nonlinearal address is intended to pull the plug on the unconscious elements of the denial, Stockholm syndrome and will-usurping components that otherwise hold those targeted psychologies’ crippling — entity threatening — victimization responses together. SHOM, and thus this book, provide a strategic balance to those dual linear and nonlinear applications.

In linear vs non efforts, managers like lawyers, scientists/academes, accountants, executives/CEOs and the mid to even lower range corporate trained are steeped in the former, and psychotherapist (Etiotropic-based) the latter, all generally speaking. There’s a spectrum of rollover that brings the epistemologies/perspectives together, of course. And adoption of objectification philosophies and work methods functioning as job related crisis-induced stress inhibitors strengthen stoicism-based linear-configured management models. This book writes to those different dimensions of training strata with a balance of about sixty-forty to management bias, and with an assumption that each also uses the other, but not necessarily always knowing that they do so. When writing to one of the paradigms, and discussion is required in its alternative/opposite, notes support detailed descriptions of the management or psychotherapy backgrounds being referenced.   

SHOM Philosophy — Psychological trauma perpetuates itself individually and collectively. The engine driving the phenomenon is neuromolecular extinction of the long term potentiated synaptic compositions of existential aspects of identity³³Refers to trauma’s etiology: neuro-molecular extinction of the long-term potentiated and long-term depressed synaptic substrate of existential elements of identity as facilitated through the symptoms-inducing stress (HAPA) response — manifesting experientially, behaviorably, intellectually/observably as grief.. Speaking to the gravamen of that continuance: a traumatized psych or multiples of a similar shared one attempt behaviorally and rational cognitively to protect the trauma’s existence so that it is maintained in perpetuity, and at the same time — but in direct opposition and clear contradiction to the other effort — resolve the trauma until it dissipates within the host(s). That neuro-bio-psycho-logical dichotomous condition pits the entity against itself: perpetual and conflicted division where standard applications of logic and reason contraindicate otherwise ever-hoped-for rational problem solving.

Through the view accorded by SHOM’s administration, great civilizational conflicts attended by humongous loss and catastrophic sufferings are, in the main, consequences of individual and systemic/collective influences of trauma upon the affected individual and populations’ attempts to define the capacities of the human consciousness and how it works best, or doesn’t work at all. Subsequently, interpretations of that consciousness, and how it serves humankind with its myriad problem-solving ideas and methods function unbeknownst to the believer as part and parcel elements of the beast they are trying to, first, understand, and second, overcome. Such trauma-affected/-effecting models will predictably produce an inadequate notion or philosophy, or worse a trauma-skewed one of what’s wrong and how to remedy it, whatever “it” is found by the relevant consciousness(es) to be.

Remove/extirpate the trauma — the psychic dichotomy influencing and controlling perception/decision making — and then philosophically evaluate for a standard measure of non trauma-affected consciousness. SHOM provides such an epistemological theory and practical methodology for making the adaptation.

Here’s how. Facilitate an end to trauma’s perdurability, that is, referring to its long-term-lasting tug-of-war with its individual and collective manifestations, by strategically supporting the efforts to resolve the trauma while not strengthening those phenomena which prevent that resolution. That is the idea, task and thus primary purpose of ETM TRT SHOM. When taken together, and viewed from their fullest applications, the outcome instantiates and then comprises SHOM philosophy.

Summary — SHOMbook provides theory for and an example of how to strategically and Etiotropically remove, but without undermining the public’s applications of Nosotropic-engineered learning and management tools, trauma’s deleterious etiological effects upon those management efforts. Reverse that perpetrated-for-political-takeover-effect individual and collective  trauma etiology, and that will simultaneously end violence’s use as an instrument of political aggrandizement, hegemony and otherwise control of targeted masses.

© 2015-2018 All rights reserved
Jesse W. Collins II