Long on words, short on insight and solutions. This book should have been significantly tightened; it reads like a magazine article puffed out to book length, and readers will save time by finding any online article about this book rather than reading the book itself--you'll capture the key ideas at a lower time cost.
This book was written in the years following 9/11, but it's directly relevant to today's COVID era. Both eras feature the same social control mechanisms, the same fear-mongering, the same authoritarianism.
I was disappointed with this book's lack of focus, although here and there it did contain certain nuggets of insight.
The ideas the author scratches at here (and the solutions she never actually gets to) are much more competently explained by professor Mattias Desmet in his various videos on mass formation.
Notes:
* A few pronounced examples of how the author pads the book:
1) the author doesn't arrive at the central metaphor of her book until page 51.
2) the author's composite-client therapy session descriptions are massively bloated with multiple pages of unnecessary dialog and commentary. The sessions with spousal abuse patient "Kerry" are good examples, as they include, pointlessly, the author's own emotional reactions and conversational responses to this "patient." Keep in mind: a therapist cannot share a real therapy situation, and so therapeutic ethics require some way to anonymize the patient (usually authors will make up a "composite patient" with characteristics from many patients), thus the author/therapist's responses are pure fiction in the first place. If a therapy situation is meant to illustrate a point in the book, illustrate that point. The rest is padding.
3) There are multiple pages of widely-spaced media headlines pulled from past eras of fear-mongering: see the below photo from a four-page section of cut-and-pasted headlines from the Japanese internment era. Later in the book, there's yet another four page section listing post-9/11 headlines, making for eight full pages of padding that should have been cut down to a few lines of text.
* "An event is officially 'traumatic' only if it opens in the mind a corridor to the apprehension of our essential helplessness and the possibility of death." See 9/11 for example. Or the (largely manufactured) fear of dying of COVID.
* Four components to the process of recovery from trauma: assessment, facing a realistic memory of the trauma, protecting oneself against future perpetrators, planning for a more serene and hopeful future.
* Another takeaway: if you want more stress and more PTSD in your life, watch more television!
"Advantage-takers": politicians, media, (see also the con artists gaming fake donations to 9/11 victims down near the Trade Center). There will always be people grifting off the latest tragedy.
* It's not our reaction to the event itself, it's our meta-reaction to the fear that we have because of the event. Fear as a contagious condition, a type of "limbic resonance" where our brains become collectively fearful in congruence.
* Terrorism only works when our minds cooperate with it, the subtext here is clearly that we have agency in determining whether terrorism expect is not even as potential victims of it.
* Interesting example the author shares where she and her daughter are in a mall eating shortly after 9/11, and the mall's alarm goes off. They jump up and flee the mall, get into their car and drive away. To what extent was this an act of agency? Obviously the feelings imposed on you by the alarm going off and the reaction you might have are likely automatic, but what about the taking your agency by observing your reaction and not taking action?
* We arrive at an explanation of the central metaphor of the book for the first time on page 51.
* "Overwhelming emotional significance registered by the amygdala actually leads to a decrease in hippocampal activation, rather than the large increase in activation that one might expect..." our brains are closed down, less aware and less able to remember when under stress. The stressful experience becomes a non-integrated piece of a memory, it is less subject to healthy re-narration by our neocortex. It's also less expressible in language; free-floating traces of strong emotion image and sensation that are poorly integrated into our psychological experiences.
* Specific "experienced traumatic events" versus more broadly defined "traumatic collective experiences" like 9/11. Events like 9/11 trigger a sort of low-grade PTSD, which can be easily triggered by a whole suite of circumstantially or symbolically related things: shoes, subways, Middle Eastern people, American flags, firefighters, Muslim names, etc.
* With these low-grade collective PTSD-like experiences we may not "drop to the pavement when a car backfires" like a soldier experiencing PTSD, but we do have an analogous increase in our anxiety and suspiciousness, and worse with no conscious awareness of what is happening to us or why. The author offers the example of people thinking Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was a threat to the USA as a form of this low-grade, subconscious and triggered paranoia.
* One could easily arrive at a similar mechanism happening during the COVID crisis, where one's paranoia/loathing was transferred onto "the unvaccinated."
* On how fear is contagious, brains can "catch it" from other brains. The case study of Leena and her daughter Wynn. Anxiety became contagious via limbic resonance.
* More padding: it takes the author 15 pages of wordy explanations of the limbic system and its purpose before she actually gets to the central topic of limbic resonance, how we can share feelings like fear as a collective. Again this is an example of why this book really ought to be a magazine article, not a book.
* Transfer of affect, or intersubjectivity, per Allen Schore.
* Interesting side thought here of how often our words and our verbalizations, rather than furthering our understanding, actually interfere with our understanding. This is something midwits (including me!) hate to be true. We want our words, our explanations, our declarations, to be explanatory, but they're really not, in fact they're usually obstacles between us and understanding.
* "For example, one person's frightened facial expression can be perceived by another person's amygdala in seventeen to thirty-three milliseconds, which is considerably less time than it takes to speak the word scared."
* Merchants of fear: what leaders, influential people and governments will do in the aftermath of a group trauma.
* The author offers another nugget of insight: imagine a crappy therapist who only focused on the horror and outrage aspect of a traumatic experience, rather than helping the client reach a state of agency regarding that trauma. Such a therapist would create a dependency-based relationship with a client who had no tools to free herself of her fears (an ideal permanent customer!). This toxic therapist/client relationship would only succeed in amplifying the patient's hatred towards the person who wronged her. Now, imagine this done on a national scale by a government to a very suggestible population... Helps explain how easy it is to turn Americans' rage from one target (say, COVID denialists) to another (RussiaRussiaRUSSIA!).
* Interesting mention of Walter Lippman (author of Public Opinon) here, as someone who bought into the anti-Japanese "fifth column" propaganda from the US government. He fell for it hook, line and sinker, and then turned around and made it real by "reporting on it" in the Los Angeles times. Very ironic!
* Six stages of a limbic war:
1: group trauma
2: fear brokers
3: scapegoatism (it's interesting to meta-consider who is being outgrouped and more importantly why: see for example doctors with specific early COVID treatment protocols)
4: cultural regression (example devolving a debate into patriots/traitors)
5: recognition and backlash
6: regret and forgetting (forgetting here means rather than regret/correct our prior opinions, we never end up resolve the dissonance between what we wrongly believed before and what was actually true. Thus we end up repeating this process in the future, again and again, and we never learn).
* Again, it's very helpful to read this book as a metaphor for the "slow-motion trauma" our society experienced via the COVID policy responses. Also, this book gives readers a lens to consider the "limbic war" the media and the US government have been running in the past months to goad the American people into a conflict with Russia over Ukraine.
* Arthur Miller: "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
* Television is a medium that reveals only what the elites want us to see (while appearing to reveal more): it's much, much easier to make a Potempkin village on television.
* "Do not pledge allegiance to paranoia." One of many examples of the author's pat phrases.
* Example of more padding: a multi-page discussion of the genetics of people's political orientation. This has absolutely nothing to do with the book.
To Read:
Martha Stout: The Myth of Sanity
Thomas Lewis: A General Theory of Love
Gavin de Becker: The Gift of Fear
Allan N. Schore: Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self