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Today, I ordered two books on Osama bin Laden. . . . I expect to find traumatic childhoods,
extreme anger at authority figures, and the psychology of
perpetrators in the terrorists. I expect to find that the terrorists
have abused their children and wives, and that they have been
reinforced by their religious leaders.
There are instruments of evil hiding in caves in Afghanistan. There are
also evil terrorists in too many homes in North America,
perpetrating abuse and neglect on their spouses and children. And
there have been evil men and women operating within psychiatry,
in Nazi Germany, and also at the leading medical schools in North
America. My next two books, one completed, and one almost
finished, are about the evil within psychiatry.
There are many forms and degrees of terrorism. According to The
Trauma Model, most, if not all, are rooted in childhood trauma,
abuse and neglect, whether that abuse is perpetrated by
individual parents, neighbors, and professionals, or by a culture as
a whole. In the long term we cannot win against terrorists who
hijack planes, if we harbor perpetrators of abuse in our homes,
churches, youth organizations and medical schools. In the last ten
years, more U.S. citizens have died from child abuse than from
the acts of terrorists. Where are the political will and the budget
to fight against child abuse and neglect? When are we going to
see a Presidential appropriation of $20 billion to fight that war? I
hope that the events of September 11 will awaken us to all forms
of terrorism, and that we will take decisive action against the
chronic childhood trauma eating at the roots of the human spirit
in North America.
Our children deserve protection in their homes too, not just when
they are on airplanes or in office buildings. Thousands of people in
New York and Washington will develop posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) because of the events of September 11, but they
will be fewer in number than the cases of PTSD arising from child
abuse and neglect in the year 2001. We need a plan for both
forms of terror.
The complete article can be found at: http://www.rossinst.com/terrorism.htm
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