What is the relationship between trauma and the formation of rigid ideological stances?

This is a great question - thanks.

I’ll offer two avenues for consideration:

1. My own experiences and observations. Without exception, every single person I have ever known — and every author or thinker I have ever read — who has held extreme ideological views has, at some point, experienced pronounced or prolonged trauma prior to age 25. There also seems to be a strong correlation between the severity, duration, nature of trauma, and the age in which it occurred, and the types of ideological and emotional distortions that manifest later on. In a fairly concrete sense, I would say that extreme trauma, combined with a lack of opportunity and/or willingness to heal, the weaknesses of a person’s innate psychological constitution, and early exposure to extreme ideologies, nearly always result in fanaticism of some kind. This is also a fairly predictable formula for the triggering of genetic dispositions toward mental illness. We might even roughly generalize that extreme ideological stances are forms of mental illness.

In attempting to understand this pattern, observed so consistently over many years, I’ve hypothesized that trauma encourages “exclusionary bias;” that is, denying some forms of information and experience (that are internally or externally generated) to have any influence over our perception-cognition. The chart in this article outlines some of these relationships: Sector Theory 1.0 – Todd's Take on Epistemology

2. More formal research. An increasing body of research seems to indicate that childhood trauma and non-supportive environments retards development and cripples judgement and ideation in adulthood. The predictable consequence is that ideologies that capitalize on fear, make negative assumptions about people and outcomes, are disconnected from reality and concrete evidence, offer formulaic responses to risk, distort (attenuate or exaggerate) compassionate consideration of others, suppress flexible emotional/empathetic responses in favor of detached analytical judgement, perpetuate self-victimization identities, or appeal to an immature or juvenile mindset of rebellion and nonconformism, will all be more attractive to someone whose development has been affected by trauma. I’ve offered some resources on this research below.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3731065/
http://resources.css.edu/academics/med/2015conferenceresources/children-and-trauma.pdf

Understanding the Impact of Trauma

Assessing and addressing the impact of childhood trauma: Understanding why childhood trauma leads to an increased risk for psychosis

https://www.ohiocasa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/F07.pdf

Child Trauma Effects Often Last Into 50s and Beyond

I hope this was helpful.

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