I don’t know how many of you know that I have been interested
in learning psychology for the purpose of studying PTSD. It seems as though
most current research is trying to find a cure-all method that will work for
the majority of people. I read a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled Outliers: The story of sucess. It explained a few things that got me to thinking on
the topic of interest.
The book talks about how language can account for some of
the reason most Asian cultures are better at math. It talks about how the way
the culture relates to power structure can have something to do with why some
planes crash. It talks about how seemingly random advantages in sports can come
down to arbitrary cut-off dates in the little leagues.
I got to thinking about those factors.
PTSD, to me, seems to be the subconscious trying to boot or
delete information that doesn’t fit into the mind’s neat little picture of the
world. Because the person is not dealing with the stimulus consciously, the
subconscious is mulling it over. Your subconscious is what holds the constructs
that have built “you” so it makes sense that it would need to work out the
problem.
It has to do with how we learn. There are two ways we learn
that I want to talk about, through repeated exposure or through cortisol
responses to “life” threatening stimulus. I will likely go into these ideas in
a later post.
What is perceived as normal to any given person has a lot to
do with where they came from, who was there with them and their capacity for
abstract thinking.
I wonder if there are a set of factors that could be
determined about a person that could identify what kind of treatment is likely
to work for individuals.
For instance, people from high context cultures are going to
be less able to express clearly what they are going through both because of the
power differential and because they naturally communicate through subtext.
Also, many high context cultures are also community oriented which means it is
likely that for people from those cultures and/or cultural backgrounds being in
a support group with peers is likely to be more effective than one on one
therapy with a psychologist.
