Shattered Assumptions

by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

This book investigates the psychology of victimization. It shows how fundamental assumptions about the world's meaningfulness and benevolence are shattered by traumatic events, and how victims become subject to self-blame in an attempt to accommodate brutality. The book is aimed at all those who for personal or professional reasons seek to understand what psychological trauma is and how to recover from it.

Genres: Psychology

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to better understand human beings in general but especially what happens in a person's psychological and emotional being when subjected to extreme trauma. I'd imagine this book would be very helpful to fiction writers aiming to create characters with realistic reactions to crisis. Certainly, it provides great information for anyone who desires to be a helpful caregiver to someone who has gone through a traumatic experience or been victimized in some way. The main thesis is that one's worldview and self-view gets upset by great trauma and there are variety of individual responses and therapeutic tools which can be brought to bear in the process of rebuilding the assumptions which have been shattered.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was first introduced to the idea that traumatic experiences fracture the usual mental framework of a benevolent and understandable world 7 years before the publication of this book. I read a 1985 article in the NY Times science section The idea that young children develop this worldview and sense of self-worth together made a lot of sense to me. My personal interpretation of this was as follows. The evolutionary purpose of intelligence is to make choices that increase benefits to the individuals (and associates.) So, we work on the premise that the world operates in a manner that one can figure out what a good choice is, and the world won't interfere with the process of good choice means good result. To the extent our actions lead to what we perceive as rewards, we'll feel good about ourselves. When traumatic experiences show us bad things happen that we have no control over or it's impossible to determine in advance what the right choice is, this intelligence-based framework breakdown.

The book seems to be a hybrid. There are way too many footnotes to feel like popular science. There's not as much jargon as you'd expect from an academic tome. There are also quotes from a wide variety of sources, including works of fiction and members of the general intelligensia which also make it seem less academic.

The book explains that most people have assumptions about the world which are like "looking through rose colored spectacles." That is, in order to maintain the worldview of a benevolent world, a person don't believe bad things can happen to himself. They know about diseases, accidents and natural disasters, but pigeon-hole those as things that happen to other people who are more deserving of such things. People wear mental blinders which let them believe those things can't happen to them. When those things to happen to them, there's a traumatic difference between past worldview and current facts which it is "unacceptable" to integrate.

Later, when discussing the recovery process, we're told denial of the traumatic experience (on a conscious level) is common. The consciousness doesn't have to deal with the harsh conflict. While denial is often viewed as counter-productive, the author explains that in these situations it can play a positive role in protecting the consciousness while the subconscious searches for a loophole to escape through. It occurred to me, that the un-traumatized person's rose colored viewpoint sounds like denial. Also, note that the book title / theory is called "shattered assumptions" - not "shattered wishful thinking" or "shattered illusions.".

Another common part of the recovery period is self-criticism. Sometimes, this may mean the individual deals with the conundrum by saying he is a bad person and deserves bad things. However, the self-criticism is often a matter of saying the traumatic experience was the result of a poor choice. In that case, the person can think of himself as someone who had a harsh learning experience from which he has acquired what he needs to know to avoid future bad experiences. Knowing he need not have bad experiences in the future, the victim can put on the rose colored spectacles again.

An important point presented in the book is that social support can help the victim heal, but there can be difficulty getting that social support. Non-victims don't want to believe the victim has had terrible experiences for no good reason. Therefore, others may tend to assume the victim is somehow to blame, and therefore undeserving of their support. Even if non-victims don't blame the victim for what happened, they may avoid the victim in order that they not have to deal with the question of how bad things happen to good people.

The book also discusses other reasons why non-victims will tend to blame or avoid victims. Relatives may try to get victims to express more positive views either because the relative wants to believe things aren't as bad or because the relative believes a positive outlook will help the victim recover. This tends to put the victim in the dilemma of expressing how he actually feels and facing resistance from the relatives or the victim expressing positive views he does not actually feel or believe (so the victim feels he's holding in his feelings and isn't being heard.)

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It made me wonder about the media. The media can like presenting "good Samaritan" or "happy endings" stories, which would be consistent with a proclivity to pretend bad things don't happen or weren't the end result in the world. But so much more of media stories are robberies, murders, plane crashes and big fires. Generally, the reporting of those events do not portray the victims as responsible for the harm that occurred. So, there seems to be both a split personality in news reporting, but also it seems inconsistent with natural non-victim views of the world. It might be argued that the media is merely giving news consumers what they want, but that just is passing the buck and saying news consumers want to hear that the world is a harmful place that hurts good people... In fiction, people may like to see bad things happen to people and then have things made better again as a reassurance that things end up good in the end, but the news doesn't work that way. Yes, the news will report on a criminal being caught, but the news tells us about bad things whether or not there's a happy ending.

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There's a Wikipedia article on the psychological theory of shattered assumptions. Wikipedia notes there are issues about the article, so consider whether you wish to read it.

[Noora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book with incredible potential for real-world application. Truly gave me a new vocabulary to use when it comes to the academic study of "trauma" and "traumatization" as a process.

[Suzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't a fan of this book. I AM interested in clinical psychology, but I felt like this author really just reiterated a lot of trite baloney about our world views and such. I did not care for the layout, either--not many studies were cited, and few case studies were described in detail.

[Ben Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most insightful books I've ever read. Helped me understand the role of NARRATIVE in recovery from trauma. Pretty much everyone who studies trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) refers to this book as the basic conceptual text.

[Andy Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foundational book to understand the effect of trauma on our core assumptions about the world.