Christian Living

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Larry Lilly’s Letter Wednesday January 8, 2008

The overwhelming response to yesterday’s article and my quotes from Viktor Frankl set the old brain to thinking and I recall studying prisoners using the principle laid out by Frankl and being amazed at how on target they were even in a minimum security camp and then in the crucible of segregation in a major penitentiary. Much to my surprise I have found the same sequence of thought and emotional response to trauma work in the same fashion in my study of personal loss by many people in the churches I have pastored over the years. This phenomena will be the subject of one of my booklets this year.

Frankl, relative to his studies in Auschwitz and Dachau wrote:

“I identified three psychological reactions experienced by all inmates to one degree or another: (1) shock during the initial admission phase to the camp, (2) apathy after becoming accustomed to camp existence, in which the inmate values only that which helps himself or others survive, and (3) reactions of depersonalization, moral deformity, bitterness, and disillusionment after being liberated.”

The same process is clearly identifiable in persons who are grieving the loss of a loved one or position, divorce or perceived prestige. Even moving from one part of the county to another can trigger this three tiered reaction to the changes in life, whether they are good or bad.

The most amazing part of this sequence is the third one and it is this very reaction to release from any sort of emotional distress that is the main culprit in recidivism, which most if not all students of the problem miss. The experience may be a prison, a POW in a foreign land, an overseas worker returning home, or a grieving person reawakening to life, but the trauma of re-entering the real world can often be devastating mentally and emotionally.

Jeremiah Denton who survived torture in a POW prison in Vietnam, learned that his return to freedom was in many ways more traumatic than was the time spent in the POW prison. While you are going through prison, a long time of recuperation of a long absence from home, even if in grief, you are in ‘your own world” re-entry hits you in the face with a huge dose of reality, said reality being, you have been on hold from a cultural perspective. The world as you remember it, no longer exists. It has moved on while you have been frozen in place.

I remember as kid watching in wide eyed wonder as some of the older boys/men in the neighborhood returned from Korea. The experience had so transformed them from high school kids into men and in many cases broken men that you would never have known they were the same people who went marching off to war. Of course they were not the same boys. Mercifully most recovered, caught up with reality and lived a reasonably normal life. Too many did not, but remained stuck in a disillusioned or bitter mold.

Over the years I have witnessed men and women who became dysfunctional due to a “time warp” overcome this malady and especially through Christ really get on with life. PTL.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2008 Use with credit.

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