In this week’s episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Stephen Sonnenberg, MD, to discuss how collective trauma can affect people, groups and societies.
Steve Sonnenberg, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and medical humanities and ethics scholar. At The University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School he serves as professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. He is also fellow in the Paul Woodruff Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Studies and chair of the faculty panel of the Bridging Disciplines Program “Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care,” both in the University’s Undergraduate College. The Bridging Disciplines Program is designed to prepare healthcare undergraduates with the tools they will need later, as providers, to create a healthcare system where health is a human right and structural disparities in care are eliminated.
Guests
Hosts
Jeremi SuriProfessor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
Zachary SuriPoet, Co-Host and Co-Producer of This is Democracy
00;00;00;00 – 00;00;41;23
This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next. Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we’re going to talk about the ways in which our society, both within the United States and outside the United States, has reacted to the horrors of recent events in the Middle East.
00;00;41;26 – 00;01;04;09
We’re going to talk about the ways in which human beings are processing this. We’re not going to talk about who’s right and who’s wrong, but we’re going to talk about the difficulties. So many of us in so many settings are having, processing the very difficult and challenging and horrific events that we’re seeing before our eyes. What does it mean to us?
00;01;04;10 – 00;01;30;08
How do we understand our reactions? Why is it so hard to talk about this? And what should we do? We’re joined by a good friend. And I think the only person in the world who might have some reasonable answers to these unanswered travel questions. Our friend and colleague, Stephen Sonnenberg. As many of you know, Professor Sonnenburg teaches here at the University of Texas at Austin.
00;01;30;10 – 00;02;01;28
He is a highly regarded, medically trained psychiatrist, a graduate of medical school, long time teacher, writer, professional practitioner, and he oversees what he has created here at the University of Texas, which is our Medical Humanities Program, a program design to bring together medical school learning with humanistic understandings of societies and how human beings can healthily relate to one another.
00;02;02;00 – 00;02;25;23
So there’s no one better to talk about this really difficult topic than our friend Steve Sonnenburg. Steve, thanks for joining us today. My pleasure. Before we turn to our discussion with Steve, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri’s scene setting poem. What’s the title of your poem today? Zachary Crossing New York City by night. Okay. Let’s hear it.
00;02;25;26 – 00;02;47;06
Arriving by bus into the city at night, I try to see it as the new arrival. Must, who has never smelled an East Village alleyway, but has nonetheless chased his windmills halfway across the world to the Lincoln Tunnel, where for him, the cars must seem to sing as they sulk across the river. Do not hold it against me, Metropolis.
00;02;47;13 – 00;03;07;15
If I scorn you sometimes like a stale loaf, or if I have never seen you as lady or as liberty, but as a thing. More things in place. You are not always as peaceful as this. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if the world can really be so absurd as to tear itself apart. But only at some of the seams.
00;03;07;18 – 00;03;44;04
Only always a thousand miles away, and only for a hatred as meaningless as it is perennial, as meaningless as a tunnel of guns, as perennial as a city of lies. What is your poem about, Zachary? My poem is about the ways in which the sort of bigger existential questions and sort of a attempts to come to terms with what’s going on in the Middle East, to come to terms with that trauma and seeps into our everyday lives.
00;03;44;11 – 00;04;08;18
Even for me, taking the bus from Newark Airport back to New Haven for class two weeks ago, and how the bigger questions about those conflicts aren’t just something that we are able to isolate into sort of policy conversations that we can approach somehow devoid of emotion but are really have an impact on how we live and how we think in our everyday lives.
00;04;08;23 – 00;04;38;20
Yes, well said, Steve, How do we understand that phenomenon? I think we’ve all felt a little bit of what Zachary saying, how these events have seeped into our lives, to use his words. Well, to begin with, I have thoughts about this, but I don’t really feel that anything I have to say is definitive or wouldn’t benefit from reaction and discourse.
00;04;38;22 – 00;05;29;28
I believe that we are living in what one might call a post traumatic world. And that and the and by that I mean we are all victims of past trauma and trauma that keeps reverberating again and again and again. So I was born before the first atomic bombs were dropped over Japan. And during my childhood I was instructed to hide under the desk in my classroom for fear of a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York where I lived.
00;05;30;01 – 00;06;19;19
Well, we’ve all gone through a pandemic that was filled with with death, filled with loss and filled with trauma. If we want to look specifically at the Middle East, we’ve got a situation where everyone has been traumatized. Historically, the the Israelis are victims of the Holocaust, whether they experienced it directly or indirectly. The Palestinians are victims of colonialism and then victims of being treated really like less than human others.
00;06;19;21 – 00;07;00;08
When it was decided by the powers that be that their land was not to belong to them. And and they were basically removed by the future Israelis and everyone in the region has been traumatized and retraumatized and retraumatized by ongoing fighting, by ongoing terrorist attacks, by ongoing incursions, warfare. So what we’re living in is a world in the Middle East where everyone is traumatized.
00;07;00;10 – 00;07;31;22
We’re living in a world where everyone is traumatized. And I would say that the trauma is contagious. It spreads from generation to generation. It spreads within generations. Now, the what we have, because of so much trauma in the world in which we live, is an enormous amount of irrational behavior because people do not behave rationally when they’re traumatized most.
00;07;31;25 – 00;08;14;19
So let me give you an example, a kind of microcosmic example. A soldier comes home. He or she has been in combat. He or she has seen death and destruction. He or she has killed people. That person is traumatized. That person doesn’t sleep well. That person has hallucinations. That person can’t have good interpersonal relationships. That person self-medicate. And then that person may take a weapon and kill their spouse or their children or themselves.
00;08;14;22 – 00;08;50;16
And we read about that in the newspaper. And we become really in some ways inured or used to hearing such stories. But at the same time, every time we do, we’re even more traumatized. Well, I think what we have in the world today and and and very explicitly in the Middle East is a world in which people are so traumatized that they are unable to think clearly, that they are unable to think empathetically, that they are unable to think objectively.
00;08;50;19 – 00;09;27;19
And the resort to bizarre behavior and trauma and and aggressive behavior becomes a way of life. Zachary, how should we understand the way in which Americans here at home have reacted to these events abroad? How should we understand this sort of nerve that this seems to have touched and the very visceral pain among a lot of people that that maybe one would not have expected to react so strongly to world events?
00;09;27;21 – 00;10;12;05
Well, I think there’s a lot of evidence that in this country we are reacting irrationally to many things. And the Middle East situation is only a dramatic and recent one. If you look at our politics, I think there’s abundant evidence that we are unable to think collaboratively about the situation we’re in. So in a sense, I think what happened in the Middle East was just another situation that people would observe and and react to.
00;10;12;07 – 00;10;48;24
I think there are many, many situations that set us off. Now, I think this one is particular really disturbing because in our country we do have many people who are very supportive of both sides in this conflict. People who feel a great attachment to Israel, people who feel a great, great attachment to Palestine. And so that makes us more vulnerable to very strong reactions.
00;10;48;26 – 00;11;28;02
And then if you have a substantial part of our population reacting with great intensity, that then becomes contagious. So, for example, take the shooting of three Palestinian American students in Vermont. That could be seen as an isolated event. And a person with extreme views and a firearm takes out a weapon, sees three young people wearing scarves. He associates that with Palestine.
00;11;28;02 – 00;12;05;04
And by the way, they may not have been Palestinian. They were. But just because they were wearing those scarves, they may not have been. But but they were. He shoots them and it doesn’t it gets into the news and it doesn’t simply remain an isolated, tragic event. People people are touched by it in very intense ways because we’re all operating with very short emotional fuzes because, as I say, I think we’re all in one way or another traumatized by the world in which we live.
00;12;05;06 – 00;12;26;14
ZAKARIA You had another question. Why? I guess my question is, why do we why do you think so many Americans, when reacting emotionally to these events, have trouble react, have trouble reacting emotionally to both sides and to the pain and trauma of both sides?
00;12;26;17 – 00;13;09;25
That is a very good question. And I think looking back on what you said in the last minute, I think you’ve actually given the answer in this situation. People for various reasons, either religious reasons or reasons having to do with family histories, reasons having to do with ethnicity or nationality or political values, people really tend to identify very closely with a particular side when in fact, in many ways, the two sides mirror each other remarkably.
00;13;09;28 – 00;13;36;02
But it’s very hard to see that. It’s very hard to see that when you’re in pain. I think when you’re in pain, you you look for a cause. And in this case, and it is simple, simplistic reasoning, and it is unsympathetic and unimpaired, I think, but when you’ve chosen your side, you look to the other side as the victimizer and you look to your side as the victim.
00;13;36;08 – 00;14;13;15
And, of course, that is, as you said, really unsympathetic and unsympathetic. Is it true, Steve, that in moments of trauma like this, we crave simplicity, We crave strong man figures. I know Erik from years ago had done work on this. I don’t know if that’s still the state of the art in terms of understanding this. Well, that’s the book Escape from Freedom, and I think it is still considered a very important work, and certainly in my opinion, it is.
00;14;13;18 – 00;14;45;29
And so since you mentioned the shift toward authoritarianism or the attraction of authoritarianism, well, we’re we’re certainly seeing it in the political divide in this country. And I don’t think that that constitutes, in fact, a political statement on my part. It really is an observation of the fact that we have a candidate who is expressing authoritarian views, but it’s also going on all over the world.
00;14;45;29 – 00;15;55;08
The shift toward authoritarianism is worldwide, and in fact, again, now, I don’t I’m not a political scientist and I don’t want to represent myself as having the kind of understanding that a political scientist would have. But I do think, again, this is factual. Netanyahu is an authoritarian, and I do believe that the authoritarianism that he practiced in Israel, authoritarianism that reflected a a longstanding national trauma that Israelis experienced, led to a way of treating the Palestinians that was even harsher than usual and really resulted in a sense that the Palestinians had of being hopelessly traumatized.
00;15;55;10 – 00;16;27;13
So when you’re dealing with a situation like we’re in today, you get authoritarianism and you get the reaction to authoritarianism, right? And the contrast that I would draw and the observation I would make, Steve, that I’d love to hear your learned thoughts on. In some ways, our podcast is inspired by Franklin Roosevelt and the notion that every generation writes a new chapter of the Book of Democracy and what Roosevelt did, and he of course, was a flawed leader as well as a great leader, as all great leaders are also flawed leaders.
00;16;27;15 – 00;16;59;08
Roosevelt used hope to bring people together and to create a whole series of conversations in our country that hadn’t occurred before. That’s one of the striking things about the 1930s in the United States. All these new institutions and sites of conversation that are occurring. It strikes me we’re in a moment now that’s going in the opposite direction, where the collective trauma has left people unwilling or unable able to tolerate conversation.
00;16;59;10 – 00;17;18;03
I think it’s a misnomer to call it a cancel culture. What I have seen are just people who are fed up and unable even to listen and dialog with others. And I see that not only on one side of the political spectrum is that, first of all, a fair representation of collective trauma and what it affects, the affects it has.
00;17;18;06 – 00;17;55;26
And how do we understand that phenomenon? Well, I think I think that’s a a good way of discussing this. But I would add something. I don’t think people are just fed up. I don’t think people are just impatient and in that way unable to listen. I think we’re I think people are afraid. I think that there is a is a widespread, very high baseline level of fear that we are all dealing with.
00;17;55;29 – 00;18;23;23
We all feel extremely vulnerable. We all feel that our mortality is on the line. I mean, let’s let’s just think back a couple of years to the pandemic where if you happened to walk out in the street and someone walked by you and you heard them sneeze, you began to think, my God, I’m going to end up in a ventilator and I may soon be dead.
00;18;23;25 – 00;19;02;27
Now, after the pandemic ended, we had an opportunity to really empathy, emphasize empathy in our culture, an empathy that would have allowed us to process and reduce the after effects of the trauma. But we didn’t do that. What we did was we swept it under the rug. And I think that while that specific example in terms of what happened after the pandemic, I think in general that is the way cultures deal with trauma.
00;19;02;29 – 00;19;26;08
We try to leave it behind. We try to sweep it under the rug. But in fact, it’s there. It’s operating there. We may not think about it consciously all the time, but it weighs heavily on us. And it really does make us afraid. It makes us afraid of each other. It makes us afraid of those who are who are others.
00;19;26;11 – 00;20;14;07
And I do think that in terms of the Middle East, it has a lot to do with why that that situation erupted as it did. And I think I think in terms of the reaction to it, again, one could say that as much as the Israelis are traumatized by the Palestinians and as much as the Palestinians are traumatized by the Israelis, because feelings of trauma, which involve feelings of fear, because that is so contagious, it literally spreads across the ocean and we have it here.
00;20;14;09 – 00;20;54;04
So I think in a certain sense, we all identify with the Palestinians. We all identify with the Israelis. I mean, people who would characterize themselves as pro Israel or strongly pro-Palestinian are actually identified with both sides. And what we are identified with, what we identify with is the sense of fear, a culture of fear, a fear of mortality, a fear of very profound damage, a fear of ruination, and and that is why I think in the United States, there’s such a strong reaction to what’s going on.
00;20;54;04 – 00;21;18;25
I mean, you you use this, you know, why is the reaction here as powerful as it is? I think I think it’s because we’re all vulnerable to reacting because we all are sharing a common sense of extreme vulnerability. Right. We were already in an apocalyptic framework and then this became a new layer to that. Yes, that is the way I see this.
00;21;18;27 – 00;21;59;18
And I also, by the way, when I think about what was undoubtedly, you know, a horrible atrocity that was committed on October 7th. And it was. But I ask myself, why did these people behave in such a barbaric way? And while I don’t think we can in a simple way, forgive that barbarism and and apparently it was extremely barbaric.
00;21;59;21 – 00;22;30;12
At the same time, I think we understand that the people who committed those acts were really, to use a metaphor at the end of their ropes. They felt they felt fear all the time. They they never knew when that, quote, open air prison that they felt they were in would be a place where they would be slaughtered, killed.
00;22;30;14 – 00;23;00;07
Zachary, I guess my question is, how do we get people in the United States in particular to move beyond their trauma or maybe not move beyond maybe that’s the wrong word, but to wrestle with it in a way that allows them to think of and conceive of the complexity of these situations? Right. I mean, I think the difficulty that we’re experiencing, at least that I’ve experienced, is in getting people to have conversations that are multifaceted, that aren’t simply polemic.
00;23;00;09 – 00;23;29;05
But it seems like the trauma of preventing that from happening, how do we move beyond that? Well, I wish I could give you a simple answer to that question, but I can’t. So let me let me again speak in a very personal and in a way somewhat metaphoric way. And the metaphor I’m going to use is what I how I have spent most of my life.
00;23;29;08 – 00;24;12;04
I’m a psychiatrist. I do psychotherapy. I do talk psychotherapy. If somebody comes to me, they can tell me in a couple of hours what troubles them and I can put that in my own mind into a fairly succinct set of words. I can write a two page summary of what ails them, but if I’m going to help them, I don’t just take that that summary and read it back to them and say, Well, look, this is what’s going on.
00;24;12;06 – 00;24;44;04
I engage in a very long and patient and often painful, often tearful conversation in which I create an atmosphere of trust within this room in which the two of us sit and we talk. And I am tested day after day. My patients use me in that. My patient is wondering, Can I trust you? Can I open up to you?
00;24;44;10 – 00;25;15;19
Can I share these things with you? Will you understand me? Now? The way we have to deal with broader cultural issues is simply what I just described on a much larger scale. We need to create what I would call a culture of care. We need to create a culture of trust. We need to create a culture of shared sacrifice, of sympathy, of empathy.
00;25;15;22 – 00;25;41;17
And I know this is going to sound like, well, wishy washy or, I don’t know, something fluffy, but I think we need to create a culture of love. I think we have to really look inward and see the best within each of us and try to make that public and create a space for that in the publics in this in the public sphere.
00;25;41;19 – 00;26;41;21
But that’s very difficult to do. I, I will say that it’s something that I happen to take very seriously on a personal level. That’s something I try to teach my students. That’s something I try to perform with my patients. I’ll say something else very specifically. I’ve been a teacher as well as a psychotherapist for half a century, and one of the things I’ve learned in and it’s it’s a lesson I’ve learned in the last couple of years, is that the functions I perform as a healer, as a psychotherapist, as a psychiatrist, and the functions I perform as a teacher are now, in my own mind, more and more overlapping, more and more similar.
00;26;41;23 – 00;27;12;10
I think creating a culture of care in the classroom, a culture of care in the psychiatrists consulting room are very much the same. And to extrapolate from that, creating that kind of a culture in a society, in a nation, in a set of nations, in a united set of nations, that’s a daunting task. But frankly, I think that’s what we have to work toward.
00;27;12;15 – 00;27;36;01
Yeah, I agree. And I think in our best moments as teachers, you gave that as an example in the best seminars that I’ve been a part of. We develop that, we develop that. How does one do that? Steve, I know you’ve thought a lot about this. Well, look, I think I think you have to be very self-conscious and I think you have to really put it into words.
00;27;36;03 – 00;28;22;04
When I start, whether whether I’m starting a psychotherapy or a seminar with a group of students, I really express very explicitly what my goals are. And I talk about a culture of care. I talk about the creation of community. Now, if if, if I, if I rule the world, if I had the power and the patience and the fortitude, I would I would I would go to the Middle East and I would invite people from Palestine and from Israel to sit with me and have that kind of a conversation.
00;28;22;06 – 00;28;45;29
Now, it’s not that. It’s not that people haven’t tried that they have, and it’s not that those conversations are not now sometimes characterized as strained and and not as effective as people thought they might be. But I think in a situation like that, you have to be prepared for an ebb and flow, for progress and setback. It’s not linear.
00;28;46;07 – 00;29;40;15
It doesn’t just you don’t just sit down and propose to have that kind of conversation and expect that it’s going to continue smoothly and without interruption. I really think that our future, our world’s future, depends on wise people recognizing what a daunting task it is to create a world in which we really make an effort to care about each other and and to recognize our selfishness, to recognize our greediness, to recognize our fear of not having enough to recognize lust for power and sense and sense of powerlessness.
00;29;40;17 – 00;30;04;18
But I think we have to put all this into words, and I think we have to be very explicit about stating our goals. And I am very, very much aware that this sounds very, very idealistic and and I know that it that it does. And I know that it is, But I don’t feel that there’s any other way.
00;30;04;22 – 00;30;23;00
Right. And I have given this a lot of thought. I know you have. And you’ve also lived it where you where you can you bring it to everything you do. I’ve seen that. I’ve witnessed that. ZAKARIA Is this compelling to you? Is this a path forward? What do you think? I think it is. I think that at at at their best universities do this.
00;30;23;00 – 00;30;52;22
I think what I’ve experienced here at Yale is obviously not been perfect. And there’s been a lot of pain, a lot of a lot of sort of I wouldn’t say conflict, but a lot of problems on campus and discussed issues. And I think there have been at most campuses. But I also think that at the end of the day, if you can sit across from someone or share a meal with them and actually have a real conversation where each one listens to the other and it’s not about winning an argument, but about listening and taking the perspective of another seriously.
00;30;52;25 – 00;31;17;00
I’ve seen personally how that even if it doesn’t change, minds, can make the culture of a place much more loving and much more amenable to serious discussion. And so I think bringing that into a broader political discourse, that kind of approach where we like begin with each other as humanity is the answer and is the way forward, although it certainly won’t be easy.
00;31;17;02 – 00;31;42;10
It’s striking to me, Zachary, that what you’ve just described is is compelling. But it’s such a difference, such a contrast with the ways we normally describe leadership. Leaders are supposed to be tough guys. The leaders are supposed to be know it all. They’re supposed to be people who stand up and tell it like it is. And we don’t have to go to a political space to see that.
00;31;42;10 – 00;32;05;26
That’s that’s how we describe business leaders, how we describe coaches. Steve, is this fundamentally about actually rethinking what leadership is? Well, yes, but I’m going to remind you and Zachary of an encounter we once had halfway around the world.
00;32;05;28 – 00;32;43;24
Zachary, I don’t know if you remember this, but you and your family, they were your immediate family were visiting relatives in India. And we were at the memorial to Gandhi. And I’m standing there with my wife and some kid, I don’t know, maybe eight years old is is running across the field. And my wife is saying to me he shouldn’t be doing that.
00;32;44;01 – 00;33;16;22
That’s that’s not right. And I then see your father. So I say to my wife, I say this Jeremy Surrey, my wife says to me, you always think you’re seeing someone, you know, wherever you are. I, I said, No, that’s Jeremy Surrey. And guess who that boy was? It was you. Well, you know, maybe you’re God. Maybe all this part of the story will get edited out of this.
00;33;16;22 – 00;33;47;18
No, no, We’re going to keep this in. I guarantee it. But I have to say, when we when we talk about great leaders who really did practice empathy and advocate for understand dying and really turning the other cheek and really being loving. Well, we we do have examples of that. I mean, Gandhi being one, of course, Martin Luther King being another.
00;33;47;19 – 00;34;28;25
Sure. So I and and I daresay a and I’m not a theologian, but I daresay that there are some saints in in the in the history of Christianity who practice that kind of of a loving way of of of being in the world. And again, I’m sure, there are many examples that I simply am not aware of, but I do think we have examples of that.
00;34;28;26 – 00;35;25;04
Yeah. And I think what you’re saying and Zachary saying this too, I think it’s not hopelessly idealistic to believe in love, to bring love into our everyday activities when someone is traumatized. This is my very basic understanding of psychology. The person who’s traumatized needs to feel loved. Well, you know, the the state of modern psychiatry and neuroscience would tell us that the way to approach post-traumatic stress disorder is by identifying a bio receptor and a chemical that will bond to it in a certain way, producing a reduction of certain central nervous system activities which are translated into the experience of stress.
00;35;25;07 – 00;35;58;12
But the fact of the matter is that one of the things we saw after the Vietnam War and we saw this very, very clearly, is that traumatized soldiers who came back to a loving marital relationships did very well, and all the predictors that were there that they wouldn’t do well were counteracted by the fact that there was somebody there who really was loving, loved them in a very devoted way.
00;35;58;15 – 00;36;49;27
Now, I’m all for advances in neuroscience. And but frankly, even if you can reduce the stress neurologically that somebody feels or neuro biologically, I don’t think that’s enough to really heal trauma. It may reduce the physiological manifestations of trauma, and in a sense, it may reduce fear, but it’s it’s not going to make a person whole. And I do believe that that being in a world where we learn how to practice love in a better, more effective way is a very important component of what it is to be human at our best.
00;36;50;00 – 00;37;43;18
Now, I understand, and I want to make this clear, that I didn’t learn this in psychiatry school. I probably began to learn it studying the humanities as an undergraduate where I was very, very blessed by the mentorship of of several really, really caring humanities professors. But now that I’ve been a psychiatrist since fully, fully fledged since 1969, I can say that I, as important as the as the scholastic lessons I’ve learned, there’s some what I might call spiritual lessons.
00;37;43;18 – 00;38;06;13
And when I talk about love, I’m calling it a spiritual matter. Well, I think, Steve, that’s a perfect place for us to close, not because it’s an easy answer of any kind. You didn’t promise easy answers, but I think it’s actually a very productive way to begin thinking about this. In a world filled with trauma and hate and fear.
00;38;06;15 – 00;38;30;12
What are the anchors of love that we can double and triple down on? What are the places where in our own lives? Our listeners often ask, How can we take these big concepts you talk about and bring them into our lives? I think you’ve given a very practical answer Find ways to emphasize love in your life and recognize the trauma that you’re dealing with and those around you.
00;38;30;15 – 00;38;58;16
Steve I think that’s super helpful and thank you for sharing your wisdom, your wisdom from psychology, and especially from the humanities with us today. Well, you’re welcome. And Zachary, you for your poem, your questions and your insights. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of this is democracy.
00;38;58;18 – 00;39;27;20
This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts, its Development studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Hairs Scooting. Stay tuned for a new episode. Every week you can find this democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. See you next time.