,
16 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… "Sense of foreshortened future" is a commonly attested symptom of PTSD. Lots of useful concepts in this article.
...the claim that one has died, that part of one has died, or that one persists but no longer “lives:” “I felt as though I’d somehow outlived myself”... “narrative foreclosure,” defined as “the premature conviction that one’s life story has effectively ended...
"there is also what we might call “one-place trust,” where one trusts other people in general rather than trusting a specific individual or group of individuals...one must first have *trust* in order to trust y to do z or to trust y more generally"
"Jones (2004) calls it “basal security,” while Herman (1992/1997) refers to “basic trust” but also to a sense of “safety in the world.” Améry (1999) describes an enduring loss of “trust in the world” that he experienced after torture and subsequent incarceration in Auschwitz"
" “losing trust” involves losing a habitual confidence that more usually permeates all experience, thought, and activity"
"we experience a fundamental assault on our right to live, on our personal sense of worth, and further, on our sense that the world (including people) basically supports human life."
"Janoff-Bulman (1992, pp. 5–6)...identifies three such beliefs as central to one-place trust: “the world is benevolent;” “the world is meaningful;” and “the self is worthy.”"
"According to Husserl, all of our experiences and activities incorporate anticipation. He uses the term “protention” to refer to an anticipatory structure that is integral to our sense of the present."
"Husserl adds that localized experiences of problematic uncertainty and doubt arise against an enduring backdrop of habitual certainty." You might doubt whether a light in the distance is really an oncoming train, but you don't doubt that there is ground under your feet.
In Husserl's view, there is an underlying, invisible substrate of trust, more a disposition than a cognitive belief, that allows us to think and act at all without being paralyzed by fearful doubt.
"For the most part, such expectations do not take the form of explicit judgments. They are symptomatic of a habitual, practical confidence, a feeling of being more generally “at home” in the world."
"It is against this backdrop that we have more localized experiences of problematic uncertainty and doubt, and make explicit judgments to the effect that event p will, will not, or might not arise."
"Hence a non-localized sense of confidence or certainty is not itself an attitude toward anything specific but something that is already in place when such attitudes are adopted."
This generalized sense of confidence or trust is, the authors claim, what is destroyed in trauma, along with the implicit belief that one has a future, that it makes any sense to plan for the future.
It seems to me that the popularity of apocalypse narratives -- the widespread *felt sense* that there's no point in planning for anything ten years away (or even five years away!) because the world will have ended by then -- is due to this.
Hot take: anyone pressuring you to lose this "basal security" or "sense of trust", or anyone saying it is morally obligatory to lack it, is a bad person who is literally traumatizing you.
