++++++++++++++
I have had some serious reason this week to contemplate — yet again — what trauma drama is and what it feels like to be stuck in one. There are two links here to posts that I would not have previously especially linked to the topic of trauma drama, but in this post I am going to take a look at something my intuition is telling me about how, in fact, both of these previous posts hold information within them that bears directly on my topic.
I searched this blog for “Grice’s Maxims” and these are the posts that appeared as a result:
+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE
+A LONG, THOUGHTFUL LOOK AT VERBAL ABUSE AS MALIGNANT TEASING
It is time to revisit Grice’s Maxims as they are presented very clearly in this attachment post link:
Maxim of Quantity:
1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.
Maxim of Quality:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relevance:
Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
Maxim of Manner:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.
These maxims are considered to be reflected within rational ‘cooperative discourse’, and have been incorporated into the rating structure of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) used clinically and in research to assess adult (secure and insecure — please follow links above) attachment.
++++
It struck me today as I was working on some fresh adobes for the little wall forming as I come in my gate — (which was just mashed to smithereens tonight by my neighbor’s giant bull mastiff who is out of her yard without her owner’s at home to tend to the problem while she romps freely in anyone’s yard she can get into — and she can get into mine — and yes, I called the sheriff, finally, and complained. The dog has been getting out all week, the owner’s have been told and did nothing about it. The dog is fortunately not a mean one, except to cats. I had one disappear this week, and just chased the dog out as she was after the other two, trampling my flower beds — I am MAD!) — anyway, I was thinking that if ‘breaking the rules of polite conversation-rational discourse’ can be used to assess adult insecure attachment difficulties, and if early infant-childhood abuse, neglect and trauma are so closely linked to insecure attachment difficulties, there MUST be a correlation I can find between what Grice’s Maxims (rules for polite conversation) are actually saying and longterm, repeating patterns of trauma drama in adult survivors’ lives.
++++
Looking at these maxim’s head-on to discover their possible ability to describe trauma drama I find:
Maxim of Quantity:
1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
Include appropriate information. When I read this I immediately think about all the trauma drama I have lived through in my life. I see trauma drama patterns repeating themselves endlessly, over and over and over again.
I had no idea when I left my insanely abusive childhood what an ordinary life even began to look like, and I certainly didn’t know the difference between a life that operates in sane ways where once a pattern is seen as NOT working, and therefore is not helpful, it is discarded because the information learned through the experience is used to move on in a different and better direction — and pattern.
In healthy people with secure attachment patterns, the experience of life itself is a conversation — a dialog between self and self and self and others that actually makes sense. There is no need to suffer needlessly. In trauma dramas, the ‘actors’ know no other way to live OTHER than in suffering! They do not even begin to realize that all the trauma drama IS NOT NECESSARY!
Nor are those of us who were formed in the midst of outrageous and extremely harmful trauma dramas since our earliest life likely to easily be able to determine who is contributing WHAT to the ongoing patterns of disruption, upheaval, insecurity, and downright trauma while it is happening.
(I just spoke with the sheriff’s deputy who arrived to check out the dog situation. He could do nothing. Animal control is not available until Monday. I am NOT a happy camper. My neighbor is responsible for this, but so am I. I trusted that when I dealt with this dog all day yesterday and DID NOT call the sheriff’s office to report the problem and instead told my neighbor that her dog has figured a way out of the fence, that she would take her responsibility seriously and fix the problem. I should NOT have taken the route I did — and I have learned never to do it ‘the cooperative neighborly way’ again! I and my adobe work and my flower beds, along with my cats and my little dog when I put him out, along with my destroyed fences are proof of that fact!)
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.
Here again, trauma drama as a dramatic expression of nonverbal communication offers us far more information that what a healthy, securely attached person would need to get the point and make the required changes so life can get back to an ordinary normal.
Trauma drama participants and survivors don’t know what normal even is, so the information aspect of learning from life is left in the ditch as we whiz through life pell mell without glory. We really DO have enough information to adjust. The information is there. But we cannot recognize the facts, are powerless to understand them, and don’t have a clue most of the time that we even CAN make things better — make the trauma drama STOP — let alone HOW to do this!
Maxim of Quality:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
Looking at these two maxims together I can clearly see where trauma drama participant-survivors have blind spots that prevent us from knowing the difference between the lies that our early lives were and the truth. We have no clear idea of the difference between living a FAKE life of trauma drama that we mistake for a real life, and living a REAL life that has an absolute minimum of trauma drama in it.
We experience a backwards reality where we have difficulty speaking up for ourselves and telling our own truth, even if we can figure out what our own truth is. (Can I actually tell my neighbor how disappointed I am she didn’t fix ‘the problem’ and didn’t even come home to feed the dog tonight? Can I tell her how angry I am at the destruction her dog has caused in my yard? I don’t think so!)
We just really don’t know how to take appropriate healthy care of ourselves, especially in situations that are unpleasant (a vast understatement for most of us!).
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Oh, so OK, “Mother, it is just plain RUDE to claim that your daughter was sent by the devil to kill you while she was being born, and that she is a nonhuman curse upon your life because she lived to be born.”
All kinds of so-called guesswork and mind-reading goes on in trauma drama infant-childhoods where violence, neglect, insanity and abuse are the fare for the day — every day — and many nights — year after year. And most of us could never SAY anything, no matter how much ‘adequate evidence’ WE knew. Did anyone who could have helped us have this same ‘adequate evidence’?
We learn that ‘adequate evidence’ means exactly — NOTHING! How do we come to get our bearings in our adulthood to survive on equal grounds with all the people who passed through their development without being terrorized and abused? The ‘adequate evidence’ of what we know happened to us, was real real real to us (and to adults who suffer abuse), remains in the tombs of silence. Ours is a topsy turvy, whacky world where even beginning to say ‘that for which we do have evidence’ is nearly impossible.
What most commonly happens is that our very lives, trapped in trauma drama, is that our lives become the ‘adequate evidence’ that something terrible happened to us and we are still suffering.
Maxim of Relevance:
Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
I doubt that I was unique among survivors when I left my horrible childhood and entered an adult world that was so different from what I knew that I could tell nobody about my past — not even myself. My childhood was NOT RELEVANT.
Ordinary people tend to have conversations that exclude trauma unless it relates to a shared experience known by many. At the same time, ‘experts’ know that it is the sharing of trauma with other people that MOST strongly heals trauma’s effects — the sooner after a trauma occurs the better.
The rules of polite society require that we DON’T speak about what is not relevant to those around us. And even in our horrible homes we could not speak because of trauma’s own inherent rule of silence.
Again, as we continue to live our trauma drama lives our lives also become ‘irrelevant’ to the mainstream. Being caught in a web of trauma we often do not reach our full potential in ANY way. Being ‘mentally ill’, poor, homeless, in trouble with the law, in battered shelters, and just plain sick does not make a person MATTER much to the bigger social whole. We become as irrelevant as our truthful trauma topics are in a world where so many people at least had a ‘good enough’ infant-childhood.
But what I wonder about most when it comes to ‘relevance’ for survivors is related to what we emphasize in our lives as SO IMPORTANT in contrast to what we ignore (deny). Putting major emphasis, attention and energy on things that do not REALLY matter will not help us. Painting the bathroom wall while your house burns down is not a relevant act.
Maxim of Manner:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.
By the time I get down to these maxims, I can already clearly tell that the confusing, chaotic, cloudy, muddy, shaky, often very ugly trauma dramas many survivors remain captive to in their lives leave us in a state of social obscurity at the same time the actual source for our troubles remains as obscure as the solutions we need to escape them.
Life is ambiguous to us. The cause of our suffering is ambiguous unless we can become strong enough and clear enough to stare the roaring giants down to less than the size of a pea. We can spend our entire lives in this state of ambiguity.
And, we have one hell of a story to tell — often many of them — and often, also, our stories are never told except through the dramatic expression of the trauma drama lives we live in. How do we briefly formulate the facts to tell our stories when most of the time we have no words at all that belong to the facts of our lives? Trauma drama reenactments serve this purpose if we can understand this. They communicate terrible realities that cannot (yet) be talked about in words.
And, our stories are extremely complex. The DEMAND not only SOME words, but truly require MANY words to convey accurately. Who cares to listen to us? Who takes the time? Where do people’s tragic stories actually reside? In the drama — in the action — in the trauma dramas of our lives.
And I KNOW trauma drama is NOT an orderly affair. Trauma’s closest relative is CHAOS, plain and simple. What stops chaos, and heals its effects is ORDER that tames the chaos of trauma.
What I know from doing my little exercise here is that when an adult is assessed with an insecure attachment pattern-disorder through the tools that have been created based upon Grice’s Maxims, what is AT THE SAME TIME being revealed is the presence of trauma drama in the beginning of that person’s life as their body-brain-mind-self was forming.
If the maxims cannot be met in the telling of the narrative on one’s life story, it is because that person has BOTH an insecure attachment pattern-disorder AT THE SAME time they live a life of trauma drama. We do not have one without the other.
In other words, putting all these thoughts back together again and looking anew at these actual maxims, I find myself wondering how helpful it might be to just copy what follows into a Word document so that it can be printed and then kept handy SOMEWHERE — and referred to daily, or many times a day, for guidance.
I say this because whether we are trauma drama survivor-participants or not, we all employ conversation with our own self in the form of our thinking as well as with other people.
Our thoughts are tied into our lives. Our thoughts are tied into the presence or absence of trauma drama. Some version, some degree of either using these rules to live a reasonable life — or breaking these rules because our lives have been dominated by the chaotic unreason-able disorder of trauma dramas all along the way — happens for everyone.
When in operation — in thought, verbalized conversation or in trauma drama reenactments — these simple maxims have the power to accurately portray the degrees of safe or unsafe, secure or insecure attachment in our body-life. By studying them carefully I suspect we can begin to learn how to apply the HEALTHY side of these maxims (being used reasonably). As we do this, the UNHEALTHY patterns that we have been forced to accept as normal and ordinary for us will begin to diminish in every way so that we can say, “Bye! Bye!” to a little more trauma drama in our life every day.
+++++++++++
Maxim of Quantity:
1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.
Maxim of Quality:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relevance:
Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
Maxim of Manner:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.
++++++++++++++
Stop the Storm 