Through her beautiful email to ACE Aware NL I came into contact with the author of the book ‘From madness to Wisdom – The autobiographical life story of Iris van Zomeren’. We agreed that I would review it for the website. Iris sent it to me and as soon as I started reading it I was fascinated. (See also our book page; titles in alphabetical order of authors’ last names.)

The book begins with a foreword by psychotherapist Rachporn Sangkasaad Taal. She tells how she met Iris, who had already gone through all kinds of therapy. She writes that she is impressed by the post-traumatic growth (PTG) that Iris has achieved. With her introduction she makes it clear that the book is about a very tumultuous life, but to really understand how much lack of safety there was for Iris, reading cover-to-cover is the best thing you can do.

The book is written narratively, with lots of personal dialogues and exchanges between Iris and other main characters. That means that you as a reader are sucked into the poignant events. In addition, so much is explained in the field of psychological and emotional trauma healing processes that probably almost everyone can derive valuable insights from it. Iris takes the reader along on the journey she has made and we see her slowly but surely ‘breaking open’, blossoming, giving light and air to what she has endured. The intergenerationality is also evident: her parents were both damaged in their own childhood and the healing work that Iris is now doing has a positive effect not only for herself, but also for others in her family line. As a reader, you witness her deep self-examination and her harrowing recovery process; with how she writes, Iris invites you to “hold space” for that.

Iris starts with a sketch of her family situation, with parents with a background of domestic violence and sexual abuse, among other things. There is a lot that gets handed down to Iris and the other kids through intergenerational transmission. That is so intense that Iris can only survive by freezing and suppressing emotions and memories. With more trauma sensitivity, several adults could probably have picked up on signals, but Iris, like many children, is alone with her pain and despair.

In 38 often concise chapters she guides us through her experiences and in many chapters explanations are included in clear boxes about certain terms that are discussed in the text. This makes it easy for the reader who is new to the topic to follow unfamiliar concepts. Where relevant, Iris has included passages from letters, correspondence and diaries; these can be recognised by being written in italics.

Around the age of twelve, Iris starts to rebel more and more against the home situation, which leads to complex coping strategies. She finds no understanding at home; her parents lack the ability to acknowledge and address their own role in the problems. As a result, Iris loses the connection with her authentic self and an existential gloom arises.
Around the age of twenty, some of her painful experiences begin to emerge, but the time is not yet ripe and the sense of security is not yet sufficient to face everything. That sense of security does arise when she is in her early thirties and meets Erik, the love of her life. With him beside her, more and more of the trauma hidden in her emerges. It is a tough road and more and more she experiences a huge rage; this also puts pressure on her relationship with Erik. However, she notices that the anger also has a very good side and that it helps her to regain her self-esteem, her dignity, to undo the “in-dignation”.* As a result, she gradually and increasingly comes into contact with the underlying injuries. The realisation grows that anger does not have to be an obstacle, but can be a gateway to get in touch with yourself. Iris describes it beautifully: “You tend to see the anger as disorienting when in essence it is reorienting” (p. 62).

The desire for contact with her family of origin remains, but it also turns out to be very complicated again and again. This is mainly because the other family members continue to completely deny the events of the past. This is a phenomenon experienced by many people who want to address abuse and neglect within the family. There is often a great taboo on the subject, which makes restoring family relationships difficult and often temporarily or permanently impossible.

After two bizarre and very intense experiences, she comes closer to the origin of her trauma. Through a clearly described, very intensive therapy process, she becomes aware of how different sub-personalities have carried the trauma for her.

As many discover during their healing journey, a long-lasting need remains to seek the love you should have received as a child in places and with people where it cannot be found. The acceptance that that lack of the past can never again be compensated for, is often intense. It deserves mourning and processing time, time in which you learn to refocus, to see that what was not possible before, is possible now: choosing a social environment that can be with your pain and that sees your courage and your potential at the same time. Within a setting that is safe, nurturing, supportive and stimulating, the ‘detoxification process’ (p. 161) can still take place, a process necessary to return to your healthy core and from there to see and experience life in a new light.

With all the post-traumatic growth she is going through, Iris is increasingly successful in tracing the origins of the events of the past. Feeling through, seeing through and living through the old pain creates more and more compassion, not only towards other victims, but also towards the perpetrators of the past. Compassion is also in the foreground when she meets people from her childhood, with whom she enters into a conversation about what was going on for her at the time. This helps her experience the reality of her past more powerfully. She also increasingly experiences that the body, with all apparently ‘dysfunctional’ reactions, provides wise solutions to survive in circumstances that far exceed the comprehension, pain threshold and capacity a child has. The pain is stored in the most basic parts of the brain and in the cell memory of the body. The pain can therefore not be healed through cognitive insight alone. The body is allowed to speak, is allowed to tell the life story, supported by forms of therapy that are helpful.

Iris ends her book with the following observation: “Of course it is not the case that old things no longer arise, but there is less and less resistance in me and much more patience. And this patience is not a method, but the result of my intense healing process” (p. 303).

I see in that conclusion a beautiful link with the recently discussed book by Viktor Frankl. In his vision, happiness is not a goal, but the result of experiencing meaning in life. Iris says her patience was not a goal, but the result of her healing process. It is remarkable that life values such as patience and happiness seem to require profound processes in order to develop. They seem like a goal, but they turn out to be the result of something else, namely a deeply lived experience of recognition, acceptance and meaningful connection with the Self and the Other.

It seems that the great mandate and moral appeal which powerfully emerge from this book, are aimed at adults: the more courage they muster to face their own demons, the more likely they are to not pass on the evil spirits to the next generation. Working on your own trauma recovery is therefore an immense gift for your children and grandchildren. The cover-up culture with regard to family secrets, which Iris talks about in her book, can then undergo a fundamental change. This requires sincere compassion, so that judgment and shame do not have such a dominant place as is often still the case today. With her book, Iris has made an important contribution to that much-needed openness about the lifelong impact of domestic violence and abuse on the young child. Anyone who is (or has been) involved in this will be able to find, in addition to valuable insights, a lot of recognition, acknowledgment and also comfort and hope in this book. With more social awareness about this, we can ensure that our children do not have to go through madness to come to wisdom. They may then keep their childlike, often oh so wise giftedness and let it develop further.
This book, in which Iris has captured her life story in a poignant way, can be very helpful for those who are looking for knowledge about and possibilities for healing trauma.

*In this blog with Jet Markink we spoke about ‘de-guiltify’; both words, to ‘de-guiltify’ and to undo the ‘in-dignation’, are important aspects of the trauma healing process.

Last week, we made a start with a review of Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ and discussed what was dealt with in Part 1 of the book. Different aspects of finding meaning are the topic of Part 2 of the book, where logotherapy is discussed in a nutshell.

Logotherapy is sometimes called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. Where Sigmund Freud focused on ‘the will to pleasure’ (psychoanalysis) and Alfred Adler on ‘the will to power’ (individual psychology), Viktor Frankl focused on ‘the will to  meaning’ (logotherapy), as meaning in life turns out to be the primary motivational force for most people. This is also what the increasingly mainstream concept of Positive Health notices. Of its six dimensions (Bodily Functions, Mental Functions & Perceptions, Spiritual Dimension, Quality of life, Social & Societal Participation, and Daily Functioning) the spiritual aspects turn out to be most often mentioned as what really matters. People can have chronic health issues, but as long as those are fairly well dealt with and they have meaning and purpose in life, they generally consider themselves healthy. If physical health is overall good, but meaning is missing, people give much more despondent descriptions of how they are. The more meaning people can discern in their lives, the bigger the chances that health and happiness flow from that. Those are then not goals in themselves, but the consequence of having found meaning and purpose in life and of being able to contribute to something bigger than one’s own life. In Nietzsche’s words, quoted by Frankl: ‘He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how’ (p.109, author’s italics).

Without such a sense of meaning, Frankl writes, people can experience ‘existential frustration’. Not feeling challenged, but bored and useless, is understandably hard, he maintains, and deserves attention, instead of medication:

Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs (p.108, author’s italics).

In other words: healthcare providers should take the worries of their patients seriously when it comes to them not seeing enough or even any meaning in life anymore. Frankl sees three different layers of meaning in life: ‘1) by creating a work or doing a deed (work); 2) by experiencing something or encountering someone (love); and 3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering (mental strength)’ (p.115). The sense of meaninglessness, ‘resulting from a frustration of our existential needs which (…) has become a universal phenomenon in our industrial societies’ (p.141) can create an ‘existential vacuum’, often more widespread in places where spiritual, ceremonial, professional and familial traditions have gone lost. This can lead people ‘to do what other people do (conformism) or (…) what other people wish [them] to do (totalitarianism)’ (p.111).
Logotherapy’s aim is ‘neither teaching nor preaching’ (p.114), but to help people broaden their views and find their own meaning in life and thus the logotherapist ‘will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging’. A beautiful explanation is this one: ‘A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is’ (p.114,115). Logotherapy encourages clients to find the potential meaning of their life and Frankl terms this ‘the self-transcendence of human existence’. Only when we can truly feel and see this, we will be able to reach self-actualisation, ‘as a side-effect of self-transcendence’ (p. 115). This especially applies to difficult circumstances, when things look hopeless.

For what then [when fate cannot be changed] matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation (…) we are challenged to change ourselves (p.116).

We are called upon, however, to relieve suffering if possible, because to ‘suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic’ (p. 117). What is needed for this is to find the ‘super-meaning’, not ‘to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear [the] incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic’ (p.122, author’s italics).
We can never be fully free from difficult conditions, so true freedom, in Frankl’s view, is the ‘freedom to take a stand toward the conditions’ (p.132), a route towards self-determination. This is typically human, because: ‘Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary’ (p.133). If meaninglessness drives us crazy, it merely proves our humanness, Frankl says. This ties in with a quote from Krishnamurti’s work: ‘It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’  That is not to say it is always easy. We can, for many different reasons, fall prey to ‘give-up-itis’ (p.141), losing all hope because we no longer focus on the remaining meaningfulness of life. Thus, we may lose all ability to deal with the suffering.
There is, however, a ‘difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness’ (p.152). Bearing whatever fate with dignity means rising above and growing beyond ourselves and thus increasing peace and wellbeing in the world.

That is hopeful, indeed. Compassionately exploring with people who grieve and suffer, the things that still make their life worthwhile may support them in finding the way back to their purpose and happiness. Seeing all this so impressively well laid-out by someone with a history like Frankl’s, is a humbling read.

A little booklet it is, in its 2004 paperback version, but a crucial message it contains and so a classic it became. Originally, the book was written and published in 1946 with the title ‘Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager’ (‘A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp’) and then in 1978, with the English translation, it got its new title, that aptly summarises the book: how to find meaning in even the most ghastly plights.
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and died there in 1997. He studied Medicine there, specialising in neurology and psychiatry. He focused on depression and suicide and the knowledge and insights this brought him, he took with him when he was deported first to Theresienstadt (1942) and later to Auschwitz and Dachau (1944). The book basically consists of two parts. Part 1 is an account of his stay and travails in the concentration camps and Part 2 is an explanation of ‘logotherapy’, the psychotherapeutic method he developed already before the Second World War, but that he meticulously described and practised post-war after his return to Vienna.

Logotherapy is sometimes called the ‘Theory of Meaning’, because at its core it deals with the question of how to find meaning (logos meaning ‘word’ or ‘meaning’), to remain resilient in the face of adversity and injustice. There may be many reasons to lose hope and faith, and one may be robbed of personal freedom, but there is one freedom, in Frankl’s view, that cannot be taken away from any person: the choice to decide how to respond to external circumstances. In the context of ACEs this is quite relevant, seeing that the essence of trauma is losing the connection to one’s true self. If there are ways to nurture that connection and remain authentic, it is important to share those with people who have (had) to go through dire circumstances.
At first, Frankl wanted to write the book anonymously, but he changed his mind and felt he had to ‘have the courage to state [his] convictions openly’ (p.20).

His first-hand description of the proceedings in the camps is impressive. Most readers will have something of a general knowledge about what these tragic places were like, but the clarity with which Frankl looks back at it, is admirable. Those circumstances were so dreadful that he writes one can hardly blame people ‘for trying to dope themselves’ (p.24), either with alcohol or by any other possible means.
He describes the phases people would go through upon entering the camp: shock (at first paired with painful emotions like longing, pity, horror, and disgust), apathy (emotional death, not caring anymore, an attempt at self-protection), and lastly the psychological response after liberation.
This third and last stage was difficult in the sense that joy had to be ‘relearned’: ‘The pressure which had been on [the prisoner’s] mind for years was released at last [and] his desire to speak was irresistible’ (p.96). Frankl describes this process as ‘from that war of nerves to mental peace’ again (p.97). Ideally this is done very slowly, step by step, so as to prevent ‘moral deformity’ in the form of revenge being taken and doing harm to (properties of) offenders.
We can see a parallel here with other kinds of trauma: feeling happy again, letting go of pain and loss, can be difficult, if those have been your developmental habitat for a lifetime.

The biggest part of the book, however, is focused on the second stage, that of apathy and how to either deal with or prevent it. Some people were able to achieve ‘spiritual life to deepen’ (p.47), Frankl writes:

They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature (p.47).

He describes it as the ‘survival of the sensitive’. What under normal circumstances might be described as dissociation could under severe adversity be seen as identification with the riches of inner life by drawing on previous experiences such as love and joy and gratitude, humour and curiosity. All of this is what we could see as ‘the wisdom of trauma’, using the mind’s abilities to survive the unbearable present. It also means that the more abundant those previous positive experiences are, the greater the likelihood of people being able to draw on them, or, put differently, to manifest resilience. Frankl says: ‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior’ (p.32). In line with this were prisoners’ efforts to disappear in the crowd, so as not to draw attention to themselves, whereas in normal life, people may love to be seen and recognised for their unique individuality. Tiny pockets of privacy and solitude were considered pure luxury, moments to connect to Self again (p.61).

Yet, humans are not merely the product of biopsychosocial factors, Frankl states, pointing to the emotional, spiritual dimension of mankind. Throughout all of life, ‘everything can be taken from a man, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstance, to choose one’s own way. (…) It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful’ (p.75,76). Remaining ‘brave, dignified and unselfish’ (p. 76) within the suffering, while nurturing hope and faith for better times to come, can give a deeper meaning to life. It can even lead a person to reach immense personal and spiritual growth.

Next week, we will discuss Part 2 of the book.