Trauma Releasing Exercises by Berceli David

Author:Berceli, David [Berceli, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

ENEMY IMAGE SYNDROME

“I distrusted everyone to the point of paranoia.”

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While I was living in Beirut, Lebanon in the late seventies and early eighties, I experienced a strange phenomenon. I was living in east Beirut which was predominately Christian. I had heard and seen first hand the kind of damage inflicted by those living in the west side of Beirut who were predominately Muslim. I naturally developed an anger, hatred, distrust and loathing for ‘those Muslims.’ Although I did not want to think this way because I knew it was wrong, it inevitably got the best of me and I became as prejudiced as everyone else. Then, my house was bombed by a Muslim faction group and I was forced to move to the west side of the city. I rented an apartment from a wonderful Muslim family and we became close friends. During my time with them, I began to experience the exact same bombing and shelling; only now it was coming from the Christians. I was now witnessing the same horrors of human degradation and suffering among Muslims that I had seen among the Christians. It astonished me that I could gradually feel my prior anger, hatred, distrust and loathing for Muslims being projected onto the Christians. They were now my new enemy. I wondered how my mind could so easily transfer my feelings from one group to another. I had the same experiences when I personally encountered conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis, Northern and Southern Sudanese and Eritreans and Ethiopians. This same discriminatory thought process would attach itself to whatever group I felt threatened by at the time. I began to reflect on how and why the mind can so easily transfer prejudice and discriminating behaviors from one group of people to another.

What I discovered is that discrimination is an animal-based instinctive protective behavior. All animal species possess this instinct as a way of protecting and thereby preserving the species. It works like this: As creatures of a more primitive time, when we saw a lion, we learned that this was a potentially life-threatening animal. In order for us not to have to learn this lesson through repeated experiences, the mind then took this discriminating fear and applied it to all animals of a similar nature like, tigers, panthers, cougars, etc. Now we have successfully learned to discriminate between whole categories of harmful and non-harmful animals. A common contemporary example of this is when female clients who are recovering from sexual assault come to my office. Often, their initial reaction is to say: “I hate all men.” or “No man can truly be trusted.” This is a perfectly normal reaction to just having had one’s life threatened by a male. The brain is simply applying its natural protective behavior and ideology to anyone who resembles the dangerous person they just encountered—a man. As the client progresses in their recovery process, this belief slowly gives way to identifying certain males as potentially dangerous and others as safe.

This

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