Neither liberty nor safety: the impact of fear on individuals, institutions, and societies, part IV

Abstract

The last in a series of four papers describing how individuals' minds and bodies are affected by severe stress. The purpose is to develop a deeper understanding of what happens to stressed individuals who come together to form stressed organizations and the impact of this stress on organizational leaders. The series also explores the parallel process that occurs when traumatized individuals and stressed organizations come together to form stressed societies. Part I focused on the basic human stress response. Part II explored the more extended impact of severe, chronic, and repetitive exposure to stress on the functioning of the emotional system and the ways in which human beings tend to adapt to adversity and thus come to normalize highly abnormal behavior. The focus of Part III was on the impact of chronic stress on memory, the ability to put words to feelings and the tendency to repeat the past automatically. Part IV reviews the way attachment schemas are disrupted by trauma and how the accumulative experience of stress leads to downward spirals of anxiety and, finally, alienation if the progress of this deterioration is not stopped.