Tangential Issues 2: So Just What are Triggers? Listen to this podcast!

So here is an example of how "Triggers" work from our Profiling Criminal Minds podcast. We had decided to watch Spotlight about the Boston Globe's role in highlighting the Roman Catholic response to child sexual abuse by priests. I had seen it before, no problem. This time - probably because there were other things going on in my life - about 2/3 of the way through I was a mess. I called Dan and suggested that we just do the podcast then and there, so people could actually hear one example of a trigger and its impact. So I worked my way through the trigger and the memories it had evoked with my co-host, who happens to also be my son. Listen with caution, I suppose.

https://profilingcriminalminds.podbean.com/?s=Spotlight

And people wonder why historians and classicists cry themselves to sleep at night!

Classical Mythology Too Triggering for Columbia Students

MY RANT: To echo the sentiments in the article.

Enough already. 

The world is full of triggers.

Learn to deal with them. 

Maybe students just shouldn't go to class until they have had the requisite years of therapy! 

If I had let "triggers" stop me from learning, I wouldn't have a PhD. 

One cannot deal with rape until one understands how embedded (and therefore, accepted) this symbolism is in our culture. 

Avoidance will never get you anywhere.

Most students haven't got a clue where anything comes from and are constantly re-inventing the wheel. 

I have to keep correcting basic mistakes about history, again and again and again.

They seem to think that the documentaries about history and the wikipedia pages that they read and the "history light" that they get tells them everything that they absolutely need to know. They will argue with me in class - until they go and actually get the facts from those boring tomes.

And they don't understand that there is more than one answer or solution to an historical question - and that doesn't make different answers right or wrong - only different interpretations (WELL, THAT IS WHAT WE HISTORIANS DO, ISN'T IT - ARGUE, ARGUE, ARGUE in a civilized manner, of course :-))

The more information, that is, primary source material, that we get, the more we understand about a period of time in history. That doesn't mean that past explanations were stupid or "wrong", they were the best past that people could come up with given the information (& worldview) that they had.

Goes for real life too.

On the other hand, I don't really have to worry about any of my students knowing more than I do - frankly, about anything!

Anybody for Doctor Who's time machine? If only .....................sigh................

Triggers: Ray Donovan: Season 2.7

I wrote that I was going to review Ray Donovan episodes after season 1 was finished. Well I didn't get around to it. After watching the second season to episode 7 (binge watching), I am beginning to wonder whether that was a deliberate avoidance.

Season 2:7 was full of triggers for me. The impact wasn't all immediate but the biggest "gotcha" was near the end when Ray stands in the middle of the room staring at his wife and says "Conor wanted the family; Conor got a family", snort-smiles, shrugs and walks away (at 46:45). Interestingly enough, I remembered it as "I wanted the family, I got the family." What is really boils down is that we keep looking for some kind of stability in the structures around us - even when we watch it crumbling. Ray tries to run, tries so hard to  make it right in all the wrong ways. The fights, the screaming, the drinking, the disintegration, the obliviousness - all because we can't change the past. The old truism "you can run, but you can't hide", it will come and bite you in the ass is borne out again and again.

My mother ran, my father took care of her. I ran, nobody took care of me, I just ended up in so many ways like Ray, trying to create stability, trying to take care of everyone and everything, and frankly, at times, not doing a very good job of it. This is not a pity comment, but a reflection comment. I think that I did better in many ways than my mother did (and certainly better than Ray - LOL). But watching this episode, brought back so many of the fights (with my original family, my marriages, my children). There were so many of the moments when one was incapable of doing anything but fight because there was no other release. Then the "I'm sorries" but nothing ever really changed. Then eventually, the complete sense of utter defeat. Things only seemed to change with the complete destruction of a world, sometimes forces from the outside, sometimes from within. Then one started all over again.

If one wonders whether or not this show is getting it right, I would say that, at least the personal aspect is certainly true to the reality of the intergenerational impact of childhood sexual abuse. The family dynamics of generations of sexual abuse, whether acknowledged or not, are being played out in this series. It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying; it leaves no one undamaged.

I will get to the entire series, episode by episode, In the meantime, I boogie to "Walk this Way" and go find Aerosmith's Pump.