Excerpt Two from "The Paranoia Switch"

We can recall 9/11 vividly, and are hard pressed to remember ourselves well before that day, because, on September 11, 2001, and in the years that have followed, fear has altered our very brains. The “fear switch” in our brains was pushed—pushed suddenly and very hard—by the attack, and has been pressed over and over again, though more subtly, in the years since that initial group nightmare. From neuropsychological research, we know that the traumatized brain houses inscrutable eccentricities that cause it to overreact—or, more precisely, misreact—to the current realities of life. These neurological misreactions become established because trauma has a profound effect on the secretion of stress-responsive neurohormones such as norepinephrine. Such neurohormones affect various areas of the brain involved in memory, particularly a part of the brain called the limbic system. Certain aspects of our memories are weakened in this way by psychological trauma, and certain other aspects become disproportionately powerful. In other words, for many of us, the functioning of our gray matter may actually be changed at this point, making it difficult for us to reconstruct memories of exactly how we were, and how we used to feel, though we were substantially different but a few years ago—and of course, making it impossible to forget the traumatic images seared into our brains. We cannot remember ourselves clearly; still, we feel strangely homesick for the way we used to be, whatever that was.

Even now, some years later, we are a great deal more anxious, cautious—and we do not like it. We snap at the person who stands a bit too close to us in the airport baggage line. Or, contrastingly, we warmly thank the security agent as he confiscates our fingernail scissors, because we are frightened of the inscrutable “others” who might be trying to bring more sinister cutting tools aboard the plane. We complain wistfully that we cannot allow our children to travel the neighborhood so freely as we did when we were young. With bated breath, we watch a lot more television news than we used to. And we reminisce about the good old days, when worrying about the likes of a little manicure scissors would have been simply laughable, although those days are becoming foggier, even dreamlike, in our minds.

In a world not at all lacking in traumatic events, how did those particular acts of terrorism manage to burn so deeply into the very biology of hundreds of millions, in what seemed like less than a heartbeat, leaving us homesick for the way we had been feeling just the moment before? After all, personally, very few people knew anyone who perished in New York or Washington, or in the hijacked planes. When we think rationally about our individual experiences, many of us can identify losses that were closer to us, that have caused us more personal pain and grief than did the events we saw only in pictures on that day, images that nearly all of us were viewing from a great geographical distance. And in truth, on many occasions prior to 2001, beginning in our very first history class in grade school, most of us had already heard stories of objectively greater mass death and mayhem. Still, 9/11 grabbed us by the throat like nothing else. It changed us emotionally, behaviorally, spiritually. It caused people of conscience to fear for the future of the whole human world, and to wonder, sometimes subliminally and sometimes quite consciously, what the true nature of that world might be in the first place. Were humans basically good and decent beings, and making slow but steady progress, two steps forward and one step back, toward a higher civilization, perhaps symbolized by the Twin Towers themselves? Or was the human race hopelessly vengeful and violent, and headed for nothing better than the ashes and dust of its own self-destruction?

We live our lives in our heads and in our hearts. We live for our dreams, and on faith. Even scientists live on faith, though it may be only the tacit (and distinctly unscientific) belief that something about human beings makes them worthy of continued survival. September 11, 2001, made us question all that—our dreams, our faith, our worthiness to survive on this otherwise hospitable blue and green planet. And there simply is no greater fear, or primal shame, than the one that speaks to us of the End, the one that whispers, You do not deserve to be here—you are about to be banished by fire from your home.

For a moment, we all glimpsed the end, not just the end of our individual existences, but the possibility of the termination of humankind. As I describe in The Myth of Sanity, an event is officially “traumatic” only if it opens in the mind a corridor to the apprehension of our essential helplessness and the possibility of death. In this fashion, and in a big way, 9/11 officially traumatized nearly all of us.

Excerpted from The Paranoia Switch by Martha Stout. Copyright © 2007 by Martha Stout. Published in September 2007 by Sarah Crichton Books, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.  

__________________________________________

Please Join me for a live chat at news.gather.com on Tuesday, September 11th from 1-2pm ET

Click Here to read Part 1 of this excerpt