Loss of the Assumptive World

A Theory of Traumatic Loss

Jeffrey Kauffman, Jeffrey Kauffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135451370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

The assumptive world concept is a psychological principle of the conservation of human reality or "culture" - it is a lens for seeing the psychological disturbances that occur in times of change. In this collection, the authors examine the assumptive world from diverse theoretical perspectives, providing the reader with an array of different viewpoints illuminating the concept and its clinical usefulness.

part 1.

Constructing Meaning in a World Broken by the Traumatic Loss of the Assumptive World

Meaning, Self, and Transcendence

1.

Crises of Meaning in Trauma and Loss

Irene Smith Landsman

Trauma and loss are experiences that push us to our limits. By definition, trauma overwhelms our usual abilities to cope and adjust, calling into question the most basic assumptions that organize our experience of ourselves, relationships, the world, and the human condition itself. The crisis of trauma is pervasive, altering emotional, cognitive, and behavioral experience, and the subjective experience of trauma not infrequently includes a crisis of meaning at a deep level of experience. As Victor Frankl wrote, humans possess a fundamental “will toward meaning” (1984); meaning is essential to human existence, despite the fact that the structures and essence of meaning are frequently outside of our awareness. The need for meaning is made clear in experiences that are at the same time overwhelming and without apparent meaning. In the context of “meaningless suffering” attention is drawn relentlessly to the problem of meaning; survivors attempt to determine, discover, or create a sense of meaning out of circumstances that seem most to lack it. As shattering experiences occasion these efforts, trauma constitutes a crucible of meaning—a crucible in which meaning is tested and transformed, and from which it may perhaps emerge renewed.

The evidence for a crisis of meaning in the wake of trauma is pervasive in the trauma literature. In a variety of studies across different populations, survivors are seen to ask “Why me?” or “Why this?” and to search for meaning in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The Search for Meaning

A “search for meaning” has been reported across a broad spectrum of traumatic experience. These phenomena have been observed among victims of serious physical injury, survivors of incest, rape victims, disaster survivors, bereaved persons, and others. Some writers have found more search for meaning to be associated with worse psychological outcomes, and “finding meaning” to be associated with better outcomes. Others have argued that it is the kind of meaning that is found that has implications for outcomes. In an early study, [Janoff-]Bulman and Wormian (1977) found that all spinal cord victims surveyed reported asking “Why me?” with regard to their injury, and most had generated some answers citing predetermination, chance, a divine plan, deservedness, and/or a selective focus on some positive consequences of their injury. Survivors of incest have also been seen to grapple with these issues (Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1983), asking “why me?” and searching for “some reason, meaning, or way to make sense out of their incest experience,” with a continued (unproductive) search for meaning associated with worse outcomes. Bereaved persons ask “why me?” as well as searching for meaning in a broader sense (see, e.g., Downey, Silver, & Wortman, 1990; Schwartzberg & Janoff-Bulman, 1991; Landsman, 1993). Rape victims whose “themes” of meaning remained unresolved were more likely to have posttraumatic stress disorder (Newman, Riggs, & Roth, 1997).

While several studies have found subjects who search for meaning to be more symptomatic than those who do not, we cannot assume that the search itself contributes directly to worse outcomes. In a study of adjustment following bereavement or serious injury (Landsman, 1993), a majority of trauma survivors did search for meaning, but there was not a simple relationship between the extent of search for meaning and outcomes. Rather, more serious or debilitating traumas were associated with more search for meaning; after accounting for severity, the extent of search for meaning had no independent contribution to differences in adjustment.

What Does “Meaning” Mean?

While both the trauma and bereavement literatures contain many attempts to identify and understand phenomena such as the “problem of meaning,” “search for meaning,” or “crisis of meaning,” there is discouragingly little consistency in how meaning is defined and operationalized. The relative neglect of questions of meaning in the empirical research on bereavement and trauma may well be related to the difficulties in defining and measuring these processes. As Lifton (1993) wrote, “Although psychiatrists and psychologists have sometimes declined to use the term meaning on the grounds that it cannot be defined scientifically, we must find a rigorous way of analyzing it because, without addressing this idea of meaning … we cannot understand post-traumatic stress disorder” (p. 13).

In the subset of trauma literature that deals with meaning, some authors’ definitions of meaning are fairly specific and well-defined, while others are more inclusive and general; some authors use different terms to describe what appear to be similar constructs. In addition, there seems to be a qualitative difference between what might be termed “ordinary” meanings and what we might call “extraordinary” or existential meanings. A general assumption that life should be meaningful does not ordinarily require that we be specific about what meaningfulness entails. Ordinary meaningfulness probably includes a sense that life has a structure that is both comprehensible and satisfying; that we understand the world, our lives, and our roles; and that we feel sufficiently able to negotiate its demands and achieve our goals. This ordinary meaning rests on unexamined assumptions about such things as safety, control, and justice, and subsumes our basic needs for cognitive clarity, order, nonrandomness, and self-efficacy.

In the background, even further outside our usual awareness, lies “extraordinary” or existential meaning. The problem of existential meaning is made clear in rare encounters with the realization that meaning or purpose in life is not a concrete, measurable truth but must be discovered, if not invented, by ourselves. More abstract than beliefs about cause and effect, more inclusive than the specific systems of motivation and reward we each have, existential meaning is a sense of compelling emotional investment in existence itself, apart from the defining particulars of our individual life, roles, goals, and achievements.

Theoretical Overview

Theoretical and empirical descriptions of the impact of trauma focus on a variety of phenomena related to coming to terms with a shattering event. In order to establish an overall frame of reference for thinking about the many different tasks and challenges that are subsumed in the trauma response, the major theoretical approaches will be organized in terms of those dealing primarily with cognitive mastery (including attributions), those describing shattered assumptions or schemas, and those involving “extraordinary” challenges to meaning, or existential crisis.

Cognitive Mastery: Attributions in the Service of Control

In the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, survivors face an essential and not always simple challenge of understanding the event itself. Before asking “Why?” or “Why me?” those who experience trauma must ask “What happened?” and, in a somewhat concrete sense, “How did it happen?”

Forming an Account

In the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event some confusion regarding exactly what occurred is typical. Survivors ordinarily need to review the sequence of events in some detail and may be frustrated and dismayed if information is inadequate to make possible the formation of a coherent account of the experience. Rumination about details, particularly cause and effect, is common. This perhaps most basic struggle with meaning is illustrated in Parkes and Weiss’ (1983) study of the experience of widows. They asserted that “making sense of loss requires developing an ‘account,’ an explanation of how it happened” (p. 156). As a starting point in placing the experience of major loss in the context of one’s life, it seems necessary to create a basic narrative that includes some plausible causal explanation, and provides an explanation that does not leave important questions unanswered. This level of meaning does not necessarily determine the emotional impact of a trauma, but represents the need for basic cognitive mastery, which may precede engagement with other tasks of adjustment. Parkes and Weiss maintained that an “adequate account” (p. 156) may be necessary but not sufficient for recovery, because in its absence it is not possible to restore a sense of safety and control.

Attributional Style

Forming attributions for a traumatic event involves both cognitive mastery, in the sense of generating a theory of the event(s) that culminated in a traumatic outcome, and efforts to reestablish a sense of safety and control for the future. The literature on attributions indicates that we generate attributions for events in ways that serve the function of enhancing our perception of control over our environment, and that this may be particularly true of traumatic events. Wortman (1976) wrote, “[P]eople minimize the role of chance in producing various outcomes, exaggerate the relationship between their behavior and ‘uncontrollable’ life events, and tend to be unaware of the extent to which their behavior is controlled by external forces” (p. 43). Specifically, we tend to attribute causality in ways that allows belief in personal control over future outcomes to be maintained. As Rotter (1966) proposed, an internal locus of control—a belief that events that affect us are consequences of our own actions or attributes—is a generally adaptive attributional style. Some trauma researchers have suggested that becoming an “innocent victim” might destroy this healthy internal locus of control, while bearing some objective responsibility for even traumatic events might keep this healthy attributional style intact (Athelstan & Crewe, 1979). Other researchers suggest that causal attributions for traumatic events reflect not only attributional style but the magnitude of the trauma, such that the influence of locus of control or attributional style on attributions for extremely severe events may be over-whelmed by the objectively uncontrollable nature of disaster (Joseph, Yule, & Williams, 1993).

Blame and Self-blame

Attributions often involve blame. Here, too, much useful theory has been developed, resulting in some empirical research. Thirty years ago, Walster (1966) noted that, especially in the case of very negative events, people often find it necessary to assign some kind of blame or responsibility rather than to accept the randomness of such experiences. Thus, we understand blaming the victim of an accident or illness as an attribution that allows nonvictim observers to maintain a belief in their own invulnerability. In order to maintain a sense of personal control and safety, it is necessary to find ways to avoid recognizing noncontingency—that is, to reject randomness.

Similarly, Lerner’s (1980) theory of “belief in a just world” suggests that most individuals have a need to believe that, in life, people “get what they deserve” (p. 11) and thus deserve what they get. Negative events, even those experienced by others, represent evidence that the world may not be just. In order to maintain an illusion of control, and therefore an illusion of one’s own ability to avoid negative events, it may be tempting to believe that victims of trauma caused or brought on their own misfortune—thereby keeping intact the belief in a just world. Such beliefs may be maintained by attributing causal responsibility to the victimized individual, or if the objective circumstances make this impossible, by denigrating the individual’s character in order to see the victim as “deserving” misfortune (Lerner & Matthews, 1967). Thus, observers overascribe culpability to victims of rape or assault, for example.

Not only do some onlookers tend to blame victims, but victims tend to blame themselves. In a study of spinal cord injury ([Janoff-]Bulman & Wortman, 1977), victims often blamed themselves regardless of the objective circumstances of their injury. Interestingly, those who had the most self-blame were actually coping better postinjury. Janoff-Bulman (1979) explored this issue further, trying to resolve the paradox of why self-blame (so often thought of as pathological and depressogenic) might be adaptive in some circumstances. She suggested that there are two different forms of self-blame—characterological and behavioral. The first is the kind of self-blame that relates to one’s attributes as a person and is generally assumed to be pathogenic. The second is more specific in that one blames oneself for specific actions one took or failed to take that contributed to the trauma. (These concepts are similar to what other writers have distinguished as “shame” versus “guilt” [Joseph, Yule, & Williams, 1993].) Janoff-Bulman suggested that behavioral self-blame helps restore a sense of control and may be adaptive in this way. However, in numerous studies applying this construct, the evidence has been somewhat mixed—some researchers have found behavioral self-blame to be adaptive and some have not. For example, at least two studies of motor vehicle accidents found that victims who believed themselves responsible for an accident functioned better emotionally than did “innocent victims” (Delahanty et al., 1997; Hickling et al., 1999). A study of traumatic injury and bereavement (Landsman, 1993) found that while injured subjects exhibited distinguishable characterological and behavioral self-blame, neither type of self-blame was correlated with adjustment; among bereaved persons both types of blame were relatively rare, tended to coexist, and were associated with worse outcomes (p. 154).

In contrast to the mixed evidence on the adaptiveness of self-blame (which apparently can, in some circumstances, be helpful), there is little evidence that blaming other people in the wake of trauma serves a positive function. In a review of studies in which blame of others following trauma was assessed, Tennen and Affleck (1990) concluded that other-blame was almost always associated with worse outcomes. These reviewers asserted that the link between other-blame and poor outcomes is probably overdetermined. Objective circumstances of the trauma, for instance, may make other-blame inevitable while independently contributing to more difficult recovery. For example, homicide bereavement is a trauma that evokes, if not requires, the blame of another, but it is also an extremely difficult trauma to cope with in terms of suddenness, violence, human agency, loss, and other factors, so it may be expected to be associated with worse outcomes. Tennen and Affleck suggested that in some cases, blame of others may be a manifestation of a maladaptive preexisting personality and coping style—in other words, a symptom exhibited by someone who in a variety of ways may be expected to have a poor outcome following trauma. And finally, they emphasize that blame of others tends to alienate potential sources of support, which may additionally compromise recovery.

Since the Tennen and Affleck review there have been some other findings that “external attributions,” including blame of perpetrator, may be associated with good adjustment in incest survivors, especially when contrasted with self-blame attributions. In a review, Dalenberg and Jacobs (1994) emphasized the complexity of blame and self-blame attributions in the case of sexual abuse. They pointed out that empirical studies frequently demonstrate that self-blame and other-blame may coexist and are often uncorrelated (p. 30). They cautioned against research paradigms that assume self- and other-blame to be mutually exclusive, concluding that “complex explanation[s]” (p. 47) combining some control-preserving self-blame and appropriate recognition of perpetrator culpability may be optimal.

The Assumptive World

The cognitive processes of “forming an account” of a traumatic event and of developing an understanding of the causes of such an event may be characterized as asking “What happened?” and “How did it happen?” One of the most familiar operationalizations of a crisis of meaning in trauma is the degree to which survivors ask “Why?” or “Why me?” in the wake of disaster. While these questions may be partly concerned with the concrete tasks of cognitive mastery of determining causal factors, there seem to be deeper questions embedded here, which may reveal a dawning perception that one’s assumptive world cannot encompass what has taken place.

Schemas and Illusions

There is an extensive literature ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note from the Editor
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Foreword by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• Part 1. Constructing Meaning in a World Broken by the Traumatic Loss of the Assumptive World Meaning, Self, and Transcendence
• 1. Crises of Meaning in Trauma and Loss
• 2. The Meaning of Your Absence Traumatic Loss and Narrative Reconstruction
• 3. How Could God? Loss and the Spiritual Assumptive World
• 4. Questionable Assumptions About Assumptive Worlds
• Part 2. Relationships with Self and Others
• 5. The Harm of Trauma Pathological Fear, Shattered Assumptions, or Betrayal?
• 6. The Assumptive World in the Context of Transference Relationships A Contribution to Grief Theory
• 7. A Self-Psychological Study of Experiences of Near Loss of One's Own Life or the Dying or Death of a Close Relative The Shattered-Fantasy Model of Traumatic Loss
• Part 3. Psychological Processes
• 8. Treatment of Violated Assumptive Worlds with EMDR
• 9. Coping with Challenges to Assumptive Worlds
• 10. Beyond the Beveled Mirror Mourning and Recovery from Childhood Maltreatment
• 11. The “Curse” of Too Good a Childhood
• 12. The Assumptive World of Children
• Part 4. Traumatic Loss and What Cannot Be Said
• 13. Safety and the Assumptive World A Theory of Traumatic Loss
• 14. What Cannot Be Remembered or Forgotten
• 15. Parting Words Trauma, Silence, and Survival
• Postscript by Colin Murray Parkes
• Index