The Sting of Trauma

A bit late on the draw here (I spent several days on Penikese Island last week), but an article in the Sunday March 30, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe bears mentioning. It is “The Sting of Poverty” by Drake Bennett which details the economic theory of Charles Karelis challenging conventional notions about the causes of poverty.

According to Bennett, Karelis in essence says that conventional explanations for the existence of poverty in our land of plenty are flawed because they derive from our own experience of how the world works rather than the experiences of those actually living in poverty. Such attempts to understand the seeming foolishness of what other people do through our own sensibilities inevitably leads to remarks such as “Now why would a person do that? It makes no sense at all!”

Poor people squandering what little money they have or criminals with two strikes on them committing a third doesn’t make ordinary sense, but it does make sense when viewed through the reality of a person living a life so different from our own. This doesn't mean we in any way should excuse poor choices, but any better grasp  of the underlying motivations of problematic social behavior can go a long way toward actually doing something effective about it, rather than just kicking such issues endlessly up and down the political football field.

For those of us working with problematic behavior, Karelis’ observations strike home another way: while discussing poverty he manages to capture the signature attributes of those living with the effects of psychological trauma. These include an externalized locus of control manifested by a what-difference-does-it-make attitude and a shortened sense of future that, when combined with other emotional and cognitive quirks, have these unfortunates forever running on a treadmill of just making it from one situation and day to the next without end.

Karelis, as paraphrased by Bennett, points out that “poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems,” and when compared to how the rest of us view the world amounts to "fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way.” 

In these and other ways, Karelis' work forcefully captures a fundamental, overlooked aspect of poverty and its close relative, crime. Even if flawed on economic merits (I am, after all, a man who can barely balance his checkbook), Karelis’ observations merit consideration for their compassion alone, noteworthy considering the manner in which our society tends to judge and treat the least among us. 

Perhaps presumptuous of me to say, but it seems likely Karelis would agree with this: any strategy to battle social ills based based on flawed assumptions and lacking basic human consideration for those suffering the very woes at issue is policy bound for failure. Or, if it does succeed, it will only do so in further alienating and disempowering an already vastly disenfranchised segment of our population.