The Thousand Natural Shocks ...

Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal
by Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D.

A groundbreaking work from a renowned trauma expert reveals a problem that profoundly affects everyone-and shows what can be done about it.

Harvard Medical School psychologist Kaethe Weingarten has examined the biological and psychological effects of being a witness to violence, revealing and defining an issue that until now had no name. Drawing on the latest scientific research and her years of clinical and community experience, Dr. Weingarten addresses the full range of violence everyone experiences, offering tools for proactively addressing common shock.

Chapter 1

The other day I took my friend's daughter, age seven, to the park. While I was pushing her on the swing, a father smacked his small son in the face. Turning away from this man and little boy, I saw my young friend, Anna, riveted with attention to the same scene.

Within a few pushes Anna began to kick her feet to slow herself down, and soon she was able to reach her feet to the ground, where she scuffed her shoes, the better to stop. Turning her head toward me, she said matter-of-factly, "I don't want to stay here anymore. Can we go home?"

Had I been bending down to remove a leaf off my leg, had I been chatting with the woman pushing her daughter on the swing next to ours, had I even been yawning, eyes temporarily closed, I might easily have missed what Anna saw. The little boy had not made one peep, so no sound from him would have returned my gaze to the sandbox where he was playing.

Had I missed what Anna witnessed, I would not have known what had distressed her sufficiently to change her plans for our time together. Nor understood why this little girl, who herself had been scolded that morning for hitting her younger sister, now wanted to go home rather than play on every piece of the park's equipment. I wouldn't have known to take her hand and ask her how she felt about what the man had done to the little boy. I wouldn't have gotten her reply: "He was mean. It wasn't fair."

Anna experienced common shock. It is common because it happens all the time, to everyone in any community. It is a shock because, regardless of our response-spaciness, distress, bravado-it affects our mind, body, and spirit.

Had I not seen and not asked, I wouldn't have known that I needed to help her express and rid herself of the bit of violence she had glimpsed and was now carrying within her. I wouldn't have asked her, "Do you think there is something we can do, right now, by ourselves, to show that we don't like it when people hurt each other?"

"Like what?" she had said.

"I don't know. Like stamp our feet," I said stamping both my feet, "and saying, 'Don't hurt people!'"

Which is what we did. For two blocks. We stamped our feet hard, shouting, "Don't hurt people. Don't hurt girls. Don't hurt boys. Don't hurt mothers. Don't hurt grandpas. Don't hurt cats. Don't hurt dogs." Until it turned silly, and we were shouting, "Don't hurt the sky. Don't hurt the stars." And then, I think the episode was over for Anna. When her mom came to pick her up, I didn't remember to tell her what had happened.

Whether we want to or not, we cannot escape witnessing such events. Sometimes these events occur between people we know. At other times we may just happen to be somewhere-like in a neighborhood park-and see a gratuitous example of violence. Unexpected scenes may accost us when we are following our usual routines, like turning on the television moments before our favorite show, but on this occasion the horrific dramatic finale of the previous program assaults us. Or an extraordinary event creates a disturbance that ripples throughout our lives. For some, the Columbia's white contrails streaking across a deep-blue sky will remain etched in their minds. For others, September 11, 2001-9/11-will be remembered forever.

The witnessing of violence and violation, events that fall on a continuum from the ordinary to the extraordinary, jolts us into a response I call common shock. While some react with obvious physical symptoms, many of us respond as if coated with Teflon; nothing sticks. That is the paradox of common shock. The more we witness, the less we register. Violence and violation become like the wallpaper, just there.

None of us escapes this kind of everyday witnessing, and yet many of us have never "noticed" it. After September 11, however, many more people have a reference point for understanding that the witnessing of violence can produce immediate and long-term distress. While the violence we saw that day was massive and extraordinary, there are also consequences to witnessing the small and ordinary forms of violence that occur in our lives.

Let's imagine that your town has a road detour and you are proceeding cautiously, navigating through unfamiliar streets. The girl behind you is tailing you so closely that you decide to slow down further, hoping she'll back off. Instead, you look in the rearview mirror and her face is contorted into a grimace and she's raising her middle finger at you. You are momentarily shocked.

Or, you're sitting in the bleachers during a Little League game, enjoying your son's winning streak. Kicked back, you're chatting with your neighbors, talking about this child's stance, that child's swing, another child's way of slapping his thigh before he puts the glove to his chest. To your far right a father on the other team is laughing good-naturedly at a child who has just slid into third base and is covered with dirt. "Oh, it doesn't matter," he says to no one in particular. "If he cleaned up, his parents wouldn't notice the difference anyway."

The child is dark skinned. You freeze. Should you walk past the folks between you and this man and say something to him? Ignore him, pretending that there are no racist implications? Should you comment to the person sitting next to you? Tell the coach? Or, just let it go? After all, it is one more thing you feel helpless to do anything about without causing a big stink you have no energy for anyway. "Life," you say to yourself.

Violence and Violation

What slice of life is it? These anecdotes are examples of violence and violation. Even though violence and violation surround us, defining what they are is not easy. People are probably most aware of the category of personal violence, which occurs when we harm or injure another. We can observe the consequences, whether the harm is physical, psychological, spiritual, or material. We have no trouble grasping that a father will hurt his son if he beats him and will harm his daughter if he fondles her.

There is another kind of violence, though, that is both harder to notice and harder to discern how it affects us. This kind of violence occurs when the social system itself exploits some people to the benefit of others. It produces the same kind of harms, but to classes of individuals.

The noted peace scholar, Johan Galtung, first proposed the term for this concept: structural violence. He provides a thought-provoking example of how personal and structural violence differ. If one husband beats his wife, that is obviously an instance of personal violence, he states, "but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence." Structural violence also creates social injustice.

Violation may be subtler and even more difficult to notice than violence. In fact, many people find themselves confused after an experience of violation, wondering what exactly happened to make them feel so awful. Violation occurs directly between people and indirectly through structural inequities and injustice. In addition, illness, disability, aging, discrimination, and immigration can set the stage for keenly felt experiences of violation. While violation may not leave a physical mark, there can be psychic traces, for violation disrupts our sense of meaning and makes us feel fear and dread.

In this book I am particularly interested in the witnessing of everyday violence and violation, but I am keenly aware that what we experience as everyday depends on where we live and who we are. What I may witness in my daily life in a Boston suburb is different from what I would witness as everyday in rural Iowa, a South African township, a Palestinian refugee camp, or an Israeli city.

Everyday violence and violation can evolve from the small to the massive, from one beating to a gang war. Our responses as a society can also escalate, causing great harm. We may start by devaluing some people's worth, then stigmatizing them, then excluding them then, finally, controlling their lives. A restriction here, an identity card there, may provoke violent protest followed by counter acts of genocide. But the cycles of violence and violation that cause common shock are preventable. That's why our responses to violence and violation are also the subject of this book, since it is in understanding these responses that we have a chance to undermine them.

Common Shock

Witnessing violence and violation can produce common shock. I chose the word common to emphasize that the experience is widespread, it is collective, and it belongs to all of us.

Common shock is ubiquitous. Routinely, we experience events and exchanges that disturb us. Every one of us must metabolize daily jolts. Since few people are aware of the chronic debilitating effects of common shock, few people know how to deal with it themselves or, crucially, help children do so. This book will help you become aware of yourself as an everyday witness to violence and violation, and provide you with tools to cope effectively with its consequences.

Although trained as a clinical psychologist and family therapist in the early 1970s, my experience with witnessing violence and violation, and my sensitivity to it, long preceded my professional training. Throughout these pages I will be drawing on a range of experiences and sources to show that though unintentional witnessing of violence and violation is harmful, it can be transformed into intentional, compassionate witnessing, which has the potential for addressing and alleviating our misery and the misery of others. There are two sides to the witnessing coin: one in which we are shocked, and the other in which we know what to do.

But first we need to "catch" that we are witnessing violence and violation. Perhaps your teenage son, whose speech bears traces of the fact that he is a recent English speaker, and whose face is clearly Semitic, comes home and tells you that a shopkeeper in a music store harassed him and his Jordanian friends, warning them in a threatening voice that the store had surveillance cameras. Sure, your first concern is for your child. But, something has happened to you too. You are witnessing his violation. Your child has experienced discrimination and it has affected him and you both. You are upset and angry. How are you going to keep your rage from burning a helpless hole in your belly? This book provides ideas about this.

Many more people now than even a decade ago are comfortable thinking in terms of victims and perpetrators, whether as applied to how individuals, ethnic groups, or countries treat each other. However, we need to be similarly sophisticated about the effects of witnessing violence and cognizant of the witness. We need to know when it is happening and what we can do about it. While many people accept that the situation is urgent with regard to catastrophic events, it is important for mundane acts of witnessing as well.

Common Shock Is Pervasive and Widespread

Like so many people I have a love/hate relationship to the morning newspaper. I am drawn to it because I care, and I feel an aversion to it because I care. I want to know what is happening in the world, the country, my state, and my town, but I am apprehensive also. I have friends in many parts of the world. I have worked in troubled regions-Kosovo, South Africa-and the news from these places is often upsetting. I worry about specific people I know and the problems that beset them. At home, broadly speaking, I work in the health and social-service sector. I anticipate with dread local stories about abuse and violence, for they are likely to affect the lives of people I know well, workers who toil in systems that grind them down as surely as the clients they try to serve.

Usually, my curiosity and responsibility win me over and I do read the newspaper. We have a joke in our family. Certain kinds of sharp inhalations of breath accompanied by short, staccato, suffocated sounds mean Mom is reading the newspaper. Actually, it means that Mom is experiencing common shock. The articles enter my consciousness. I am touched and troubled. However brief, the experience rankles, prickles, disturbs. The words are not just lines on paper, black marks on white. They transmigrate from there to here, so that-even for a moment-the story is now inside my internal world and I am upset. Then, I read on. To the next article, and the next. My reaction may happen five or fifteen times in one pass through the paper. Joke or not, my family is right; I am affected as I read the paper.

Or listen to the news. Try as I might, these days, I cannot make it background. I cannot make it just information. I have learned, finally, to turn the radio off when I feel my mood slip from whatever it was before I turned it on to whatever it must be to resonate with the pain and horror on the sound waves, lapping our psychic shores 24/7.

It is precisely this dimension of constancy that makes it so likely that there is an epidemic of gargantuan proportions in our world today. One with no name. A silent, all-but-invisible epidemic that is profoundly altering the course of our lives without our even knowing it.

By the time the average child is twelve years old in the United States, he has seen eight thousand murders and a hundred thousand acts of violence on network television. The problem with this isn't just quantity; the majority of these acts are presented as if there are no direct or physically or psychologically harmful effects, and without any moral judgment. If common shock is an epidemic, these kinds of triggers are the pathogen. As in any illness epidemic, not everyone who is exposed to the pathogen will be negatively affected by it. Some people are hardier than others, either because they have had a lower lifetime exposure to violence and violation, making them less vulnerable to experiences that trigger common shock, and/or because their biological makeup assists them in restoring equilibrium more swiftly than others.

Adults observe violent acts, are affected by them, and yet may not even register what is going on. I am trained to recognize acts of violence and I am studying the phenomenon of common shock. Yet I have had occasions when others pointed out acts of violence retrospectively that I had entirely missed. In a self-inventory of my daily exposures to events and transactions that produce common shock, I would never have counted these instances. Which is exactly my point. Common shock is pervasive and we do not even know it.

From Common Shock by Kaethe Weingarten, copyright © 2003 Kaethe Weingarten, published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has been on the faculty since 1979. She founded and directs the Witnessing Project (www.witnessingproject.org). Dr. Weingarten also teaches at the Family Institute of Cambridge and has taught in Canada, Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.