Hysteria is Historical

That Poor Girl, Hysteria, is Blamed for so Much

In therapeutic and recovery circles, the phrase hysteria is historical means that if an intense, out-of-proportion emotional reaction explodes inside you, then you are probably experiencing an unresolved trauma from the past. I think of it as stepping on a landmine. Hysteria and I are old friends now, because she always comes bearing an extravagant gift: freedom.

Throughout my decades of unpacking a childhood drenched in domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and sexual misconduct, if I had an out-sized reaction to any trigger, I taught myself to stop. Become still. Pull my focus from external stimuli to the internal cause. Feel my negative emotions rather than act them out, even though acting them out can feel sooo satisfying.

While that bastard deserves everything he has coming, healing is more important. Here’s the prayer: I’m willing to feel this, which isn’t directed to any god. No mythological figures are necessary.

After the whirlwind of emotion subsides, clarity comes like the morning after a thunderstorm. The dark night of the ego (thanks Kelly Thompson TNWWY ) can seem long, but if the willingness is there, clarity never fails.

Then, if there is something to do or say, it comes from unshakable clarity, which is an attribute of love. It almost sings Wha-Haaa! Automatically, love loves everyone involved. The discipline is strict and difficult, but it’s the only thing that improves circumstances. Acting out invariably makes situations worse.

The word, hysteria, when applied to mass violence like witch trials, has always bothered me. You probably already know that the diagnosis derives its logical heft from the ancient Greek word, meaning womb, and the belief that the womb was the seat of the outsized emotions belonging to women. Women were emotionally difficult due to their “wandering womb.” Men, of course, weren’t plagued by hysteria because they didn’t have the offending organ

In the late 1800s, Jean-Martin Charcot developed a systematic medical study of the disease and its symptomology and presented his findings to a roomful of like-minded medical men. After that, Charcot’s students, Sigmund Freud chief among them, were off to the races. “Hysterical paroxysms,” now known as an orgasm, was the agreed-upon treatment. This procedure was administered in the doctor’s office, using only a manipulation of the wandering womb by the doctor’s skillful hands. Looking at you, Larry Nassar.

So, here’s the question that plagues me: Why did the mostly male historians blame the tens of thousands of judicial witch trial murders in the U.S. and Europe on hysteria? Were they saying that women were to blame for their own murders? That’s some serious victim-blaming there. It sounded like my dad, looming over my mom, kicking her and yelling, “Why do you make me do this?”

My discomfort with those questions sparked my second novel, an examination of the Hartford witch trials, which took place more than four decades before Salem. Not many people know that we had two witch-hysterias. Does that make us serial hysteriacs? Of course, a historical novel is also an analogy for the current political situation, or why bother at all? I obsessively wondered: Is this how our history rhymes? Are all novelists just a wee bit obsessive, or is it just me?

How does our current mental health crisis mirror the past? Are we periodically hysterical? Cyclically so? Menstrually?

Can our almost unrelenting anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors be responses to the crisis of patriarchal violence devastating both men and women? What about our epidemic levels of domestic violence and violence against Nature, and rape culture? While the consequences are multiplying, we steadfastly believe in the patriarchal worldview that acting out in violence solves problems and dominating people is the only way to win.

The foundation of that worldview in the U.S. was a purity project - our original colonies - the fight for freedom of religion! But that’s not true at all. No one was free. You were fined if you didn’t attend church. The church, which was the state, could accuse you of witchcraft—death by judicial murder.

Hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples lived in the eastern U.S. before the colonists arrived. When you’re in grade school, you read that those poor wretches didn’t have immunity to European disease. But, later, if you went to college, you read about smallpox blankets and the Pequot massacre. But Puritans get a pass here, too, because they were hysterical. I mean, they were surrounded. Terrified. What else could they have done?

If the patriarchal control of Nature, indigenous peoples, and, of course, women isn’t enough mental illness, just add a cupful of Calvinist self-loathing, which teaches that violent form of original sin called “Total Depravity.” That’s our natural state. That’s why it takes so much violence to control us.

Who looks at a newborn baby and thinks: total depravity? Not a mother-god, I can tell you that.

Add to that, you must be stoic—no compassion allowed. Spare the rod, spoil that child. Go on. Take a deep breath, swallow those difficult emotions, and save him with violence. In our patriarchal mythology, we are so naturally bad that the only solution is a strong daddy. Like God. God is a strong daddy, and our authoritarians must be as strong and unfeeling as God, or we are all damned - which we probably are anyway from before birth (predestination), no matter what we do, but still we won’t surrender. Because we are exceptional. That’s why wealthy people are considered gods and not craven power-addicts. They were pre-selected by God, or given some kind of genius, by God, of course. That’s why we can never hold them accountable. It would be like holding God accountable. God forbid, and yet, that’s precisely what I propose.

The mental illness in this country, as in many countries, is the worship of dominance. The problem is our worldview, our mythology, our monotheistic patriarchal religion, which shifted the creator god from being a divine mother who gives birth to a dominion-claming father who creates through his word. Not much travail in that.

And what we made in his name is an upside-down system, exactly opposite of what comes naturally - indigenously. That’s right. Patriarchal control is not natural. That’s why it takes violence to maintain it. In the original colonies, as now, if you are on the outskirts of belonging, you are a target. And just as in middle school, the whole culture could turn on you in a heartbeat. God forbid. They’ll threaten your children. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Our particular mental illness begins with the violence against natural, matrifocal indigenous societies, which Puritans were determined to erase. Of course, the Puritans brought that dis-ease and those tactics with them, but let’s keep our focus here. Not only did they commit atrocities against the colonized, but they also made laws against “going native,” which were intrinsically linked to the suppression of “sedicious” or “satanic” matrifocal egalitarian societies.

What’s natural is extended matrifocal families, where raising children is the point, and everyone serves that purpose in their own way, whether they have physical children or not. All the children belong to everyone, and are naturally accepted just as they are, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. But you can love your biological children more if you want to.

Naturally, lineage is counted through the mother. You come out of her body, while anyone could be a father. Clans lived in longhouses of extended matrilineal families, but that doesn’t mean men had no power. When a woman is going through difficulties, the clan shifts, people pick up the slack, and give her the time and peace she needs. Mothers were not isolated in single-family homes, where they’re chained to 80% of unpaid labor and 90% of all emotional labor.

We should all be so lucky as to go native and become more matrifocal. What if only clan mothers could declare war? Where would Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu be then? In trouble with the grandmothers, that’s where. And you don’t want that. The Nonners can be terrifying.

This is the system our Puritan fathers were so threatened by that they were determined to destroy it. This is the culture they described as “Satanic,” backed by laws against “going native.” Because once people did, they often had to be brought back in chains - especially men. It can’t be said enough: Patriarchy is terribly cruel to men, too, which brings me back to our collective mental illness, our mass hysteria, a symptom of which is an epidemic of domestic violence, which leads to outbreaks of the domestic terror of mass shootings, and the violent round-up of black and brown and indigenous peoples in indiscriminate ICE raids. We are hysterical.

Here are the symptoms of mass hysteria that AI used to characterize the witch trials for me. The parentheses are mine.

1. Lack of legal due process (ICE)

2. Contagion and Clustering Effect. (copy-cat mass shootings caused by sensational media coverage)

3. Moral Panic of Status Loss (God-given dominance is slipping)

4. Scapegoating/Simplified Narratives. (Complex social problems blamed on witches - or immigrants.)

So, what happened during the Hartford witch trials of the 1600s, and later in Salem? Mass hysteria? A one-and-done and thank-God-we-are-so-logical-now? Of course not. It was (is) a trauma-induced hysteria, a mental illness caused by a worldview that goes against nature. It’s chronic. Remember the point of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible? He argued that the McCarthy hearings on un-American activities were another outbreak of the witch-hunt hysteria.

And here we are again. Conservatives are right about one thing, though. Guns don’t kill, people do. Sick people, traumatized people acting out unspeakable pain. Until we can have mass healings instead of mass shootings, we’d better put in those common-sense gun regulations the majority of us are clamoring for. Honestly, though, death through partner violence kills way more people—all the more reason.

Our mass shootings arise out of our domestic violence crisis. This is what the Hartford and Salem panics were, too—an outpicturing of our trauma. And in the last election, some people fervently wanted a strong daddy in charge because they were terrified that allowing differences would end the world as God wants it. Now, that’s a hysterical worldview.

Why was my father so violent, so filled with impotence, rage, and shame? Because he had internalized a set of standards imposed on him by the culture he was born into. The man box: He must be stoic, dominant, and in control. He took it into his not-yet lungs through the amniotic fluid in his mother’s womb. And it killed him, though it took 45 years of the steady drip, drip, drip of toxic shame.

We must recover from the Father Knows Best trauma that leads to the narcissistic displays that become our wars, our mass shootings, and the private despair that leads to our suicide epidemic, where men outnumber women 3:1. Yet, if you listen to patriarchal voices, they’ll tell you we need to double down on an unnatural system that never worked in the first place.

Don’t listen. Run an experiment. Just open your eyes and blink. Look around. Check the weather. Read the news. We are suffering from internalized domestic violence that is projected onto the world as patriarchal hysteria.

But this time, so many of us have gone through some kind of recovery and ended up on the other side. Is it enough for a tipping point? I hope so. Honestly, I think so.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

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