Appendix E: After-Trauma Individual, General Systemic, and even Nationally-/Globally-Presenting Symptoms

Generic Traumatic Effects on Polities

Following imposition of a traumatic event that creates individual and systemic trauma etiology, targeted members will ALWAYS and EITHER proceed into one of three general categories:

I

Try to disappear,psychologically speaking. Cliche — “head in the sand” — and “denial” most often describe this element of systemic traumatic influence. Its purpose: neutralize by inducing immobility of decision making into this component, for example one third of the overall targeted constituency. While being psycho-pulverized, this group both advocates for and hides behind diplomacy-based problem solving and legal solutions which otherwise are rendered moot by a dearth of enforcement provisions. Is akin to rationalizing a live-in alcoholic/drug addict’s increasingly toxically induced bizarre behavior till after thirty-five years or so of the onslaught, taking what was before unacceptability to the now new norm. Inevitably and within that newness, you are made responsible for it as well; and I’m sorry to say also opined by others and the traumatized self to have wanted it all along — classically coping through individual victim and patho-system hindsight’s perceptual reconfiguration of the pre traumatized entity.

II

Another portion, say again for example a second third, will respond by fighting, which is in this use to mean also caring profoundly to the extent of risking one’s life for family, neighbors, community and nation as a whole.

III

Aggressively support, align with, defend, help the perpetrators — Stockholm Syndrome. Along and in conjunction with the constituency hiding out in number one, this component undermines the efforts of those (in number two) who otherwise would strive to resist the invasion.

The trauma symptoms in this panel depict an open (free expression) system’s response to the generic application against it of asymmetric — guerrilla / terrorism — warfare.
1. media hysteria
2. chaos, panic
3. surrealism
4. massive denial of the etiology from past events minimizes the increasing need to take appropriate action, that is, to take direct military action against the perpetrators – war
5. grief continuums: emotions attending grief include shock, confusion, terror, horror, anger, profound sadness, the experience of loss
6. and the opposite, staunch rebuke (hiding from) of the internal emotional elements attending the events
7. eidetic (movie like) memory recall
8. startle, withdrawal, irritability, connection (relationship) impediments, hyperarousal (all are symptoms for individuals and systems)
9. paranoia
10. dissociation
11. overwhelming confusion
12. preaching ‘we have to be tough’ when it’s too late
13. obsessive (constant) media reference to and pronounced fears of/about ‘quagmires’
14. extraordinary and pathological divisiveness (intra-system conflict alters opposition focus)
15. fusion between team members
16. low morale
17. troop expressions of low morale: ‘I want to go home’ 
18. Stockholm syndrome effect (where the invaded system’s members support the attacking opposition)
19. leadership deception
20. leadership blame by competing parties, weakening security: the blame supports OTM (Offensive Trauma Managers, sometime called “terrorists”) will
21. possible over-constraint of civil liberty
22. home front attacks on military personages
23. rationalizing mission goals
24. third party exploitation of the disintegrating personal and professional identities
25. third party exploitation, as in surfing the ripples caused by the stone’s contact with the pond, of individual and system symptom manifestation
26. perfidy
27. expressions of will asundered
28. dramatic lessening of regard for mission meaning
29. premature abandonment of the mission
30. repeated castigation of individual, unit and national selves
31. ever questioning, without answers, the meaning and purpose of the war and themselves within it
32. inability to adjudicate treason

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