A page from The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley
I guess it’s not exactly surprising, but it seems to explain a lot of things I’m witnessing in my later adulthood. I’ve always felt deeply impressed by selfless heroes, but I never really pondered the profile of heroism.
The text does not speak of trauma. Trauma is not “bad things that happen to you,” it is “things that happen to you that break you.” Two people might have the same experience. One receives life-long trauma and one receives a valuable lesson. You might expect people who have been beaten by their parents to be more likely to bear trauma, but this text doesn’t make that claim. You’d have to call on something else.
This text appears to me to be saying that children who witness their parents suppressing their empathy (such as they must to inflict physical pain) are more likely to do the same.
Ripley discusses trauma early in the book and there appears to be some correlation between the size of a person’s hippocampus and their capacity to absorb and rebound from traumatic events.