Economic PTSD: The Psychological Effects of the Recession

By Michael Bader, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2009.

The fact that millions of people were saying the exact same thing didn't mitigate the painful feelings of responsibility and guilt that they had then, and such facts don't seem to alter similar feelings today. People feel a deep need, almost a compulsion, to take on individual responsibility for their lot in life, despite oceans of evidence that they're victims of forces they cannot individually control. And every story of someone who beat the odds, bet against the market, or escaped unscathed just serves to reinforce this self-blaming tendency.

If there's one thing I've learned from my work over 30 years with people who have been hurt or traumatized, it's this: Human beings can't tolerate helplessness. When we're helpless, we feel an unconscious need to spin a story about it, a story in which we somehow had choices or one in which our suffering had some transcendent meaning.

One of my patients lost everything in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Even though she had retrofitted her house in exactly the same casual way as her neighbors, she criticized herself for not hiring a top-flight structural engineer to insure that the retrofit was state-of-the-art.

Another patient dealt with feelings of loss about finally leaving her abusive boyfriend of seven years by feeling guilty that she hadn't given him enough "chances." Abused children routinely blame themselves for their parents' neglect and violence. In each of these cases, we see someone who can't feel cleanly and simply victimized, who can't feel helpless and who certainly cannot feel innocent.

Innocence and helplessness are intertwined in our psyches. After all, if we're truly helpless, we should feel innocent and not guilty. If we can't really control a situation, then we can't be responsible for its outcome. But since our psyches can't tolerate facing helplessness, then we will also have a problem feeling innocent. For example, when people are given a chance to talk at length about financial losses over which they had no control, there is usually more than a trace of guilt.

Recently, I've had the opportunity to listen to people who were swindled by Bernard Madoff blame themselves for having trusted him. Their outrage and despair is contaminated by an irrational guilt, irrational because while they might have been legally responsible for their investment, it was obviously not a "choice" in the sense for which they blame themselves. Madoff had impeccable credentials and came highly recommended by all the "experts."

It would be like women in the 1950s blaming themselves for babies born with birth defects because they took the Thalidomide prescribed by their doctors for morning sickness. Choice, responsibility and guilt would hardly be reasonable considerations here, and yet, we all know that this is exactly what many of these women felt then, and it's what victimized shareholders privately feel now. We have a difficult time feeling innocent and helpless. 

Why is this? Well, we certainly have a culture that idealizes individual responsibility, that idealizes the "self-made man" who succeeds despite all obstacles. Despite abundant evidence demonstrating the near-impossibility of overcoming the combined constraints of social class, education, early child-rearing, cultural norms and even chance, it's almost impossible to shake off the notion that we live in a meritocracy that rewards the worthy. Because some people overcome the odds, just like some people anticipated this recession, there can be no innocent victims here. Since everybody in the same situation doesn't fail, then failure has to be an individual matter.

Or perhaps there is something quintessentially human about free choice -- namely, that even in the harshest and most constrained of environments, we are compelled to believe we're free, that we have choices, that, we believe, with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, that "freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." Perhaps I can't control my external environment, but I can control how I feel about it.

Thus, despite being objectively helpless, whether in the face of a stock market crash or an economic recession, a natural disaster or the gross injustice of other people, we will always believe that there's something we could have done about it then or can do about it now, and blame ourselves if such reactions are absent.

A deeper and, in my view, more important source of the difficulty most people have feeling helpless and innocent lies in the psychology of childhood. The psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn once said, "Children would rather be sinners in heaven than saints in hell." What he meant was that children would prefer to believe that they come from a just and good family in which they were bad than an unjust or bad family in which they were good.

For this reason, abused children often report that they provoked their parents' violence, and adults often qualify accounts of their own early beatings with the caveat that they were "difficult" children.

See more stories tagged with: economy, psychology, depression, recession, financial crisis, shame, guilt

Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco. He is the author of "Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies" and "Male Sexuality: Why Women Don't Understand It -- and Men Don't Either." He has written extensively about psychology and politics.

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