[People In Captivity Become Adept Practitioners Of The Arts Of Altered Consciousness. Through The Practice

[“People in captivity become adept practitioners of the arts of altered consciousness. Through the practice of dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimization, and sometimes outright denial, they learn to alter an unbearable reality. Ordinary psychological language does not have a name for this complex array of mental maneuvers, at once conscious and unconscious. Perhaps the best name for it is doublethink, in Orwell’s definition: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The [person] knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity. . . . Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.”

(…) In addition to the use of trance states, prisoners develop the capacity voluntarily to restrict and suppress their thoughts. This practice applies especially to any thoughts of the future. Thinking of the future stirs up such intense yearning and hope that prisoners find it unbearable; they quickly learn that these emotions make them vulnerable to disappointment and that disappointment will make them desperate. They therefore consciously narrow their attention, focusing on extremely limited goals. The future is reduced to a matter of hours or days.

Alterations in time sense begin with the obliteration of the future but eventually progress to the obliteration of the past. Prisoners who are actively resisting consciously cultivate memories of their past lives in order to combat their isolation. But as coercion becomes more extreme and resistance crumbles, prisoners lose the sense of continuity with their past. The past, like the future, becomes too painful to bear, for memory, like hope, brings back the yearning for all that has been lost. Thus, prisoners are eventually reduced to living in an endless present.

(…) Along with the alteration in time sense comes a constriction in initiative and planning. Prisoners who have not been entirely “broken” do not give up the capacity for active engagement with their environment. On the contrary, they often approach the small daily tasks of survival with extraordinary ingenuity and determination. But the field of initiative is increasingly narrowed within confines dictated by the perpetrator. The prisoner no longer thinks of how to escape, but rather of how to stay alive, or how to make captivity more bearable. A concentration camp inmate schemes to obtain a pair of shoes, a spoon, or a blanket; a group of political prisoners conspire to grow a few vegetables; a prostitute maneuvers to hide some money from her pimp; a battered woman teaches her children to hide when an attack is imminent. This narrowing in the range of initiative becomes habitual with prolonged captivity, and it must be unlearned after the prisoner is liberated.”]

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

[People In Captivity Become Adept Practitioners Of The Arts Of Altered Consciousness. Through The Practice

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