Blog Post Title One

The term flashback is misleading. To those who are not traumatised it has a certain incredulous pyrotechnic. The inference is that there is some reality switch and all of a sudden the person is "back there".

The classic and much-potted example is the US soldier, back from Afghanistan, in the Walmart car park, when a car backfires — she turns around to see him cowering behind the shopping cart. He is "back in Afghanistan". This of course happens, and many a PTSD sufferer will recount stories just like this.

But I believe it is more accurate to say that he never really left. You never really leave. There is no flash about it, there is no "there" to go back to — it is in you, whether you realise it or not. It is an augmented somatic reality machine that you are stuck inside of. All that changes is your awareness of this.

I had such an experience recently. I have deferred — and now I see why — any consumption of the news around what is currently happening in Gaza and the Middle East. As a therapist I have been hearing this from my clients for years — really ever since October 7th. They have been bringing in their horror and concern for the children of Gaza.

I told them to practise mental hygiene. Not out of callousness, but simply because there was nothing really they could do and — for some of these clients — they had much more proximal concerns they could actually affect. I was also worried about their suicidality and did not think that a daily dose of the unfathomable quantity of unnecessary psychological and physical suffering in their fellow humans, that fell outside their capacity to help, would do their sense of helplessness and worthlessness any good.

And I would do this again — it was technically the right call — but I also see how, whilst I was protecting them from an overburdening of their own sense of helplessness, I was protecting myself too.

I sat down and let the algorithm have its way with me. Instagram flooded my feed with story after story — a wave of horrifying corroboration of what is, for those that have eyes to see it, a genocide. The algorithm led me in slowly. I saw a deposition by a very suave and handsome professor of surgery. It was effectively — not exactly benign — but understated. And then he explained how he had seen and treated many children with gunshot wounds to the head.

I was so ignorant of what was happening this seemed bizarre — a drone, a toy, a quadcopter with a gun attached to it. It had the bizarre, almost unthinkable juxtaposition of the now-very-dated Austin Powers movie’s diabolical plan to have sharks with lasers on their heads.

But this isn’t a dated 90s spoof movie — this is real life. And the dead 3-year-old that (insert doctor’s name) used the last shunt in the strip to try to save, was real enough too. He broke down — not in novelty — but with the collapsing, imploding sentiment of someone who is traumatised.

The phenomenology of trauma is as I say it: augmented somatic reality. Some part of him had never left the vigil beside this little dead girl’s bed in Gaza and never would.

I woke that night bolt upright at 1am. My little boy is learning to sleep by himself so I was on a blow-up mattress beside his little bed and could hear his little rasping breath. I didn’t have a flashback, no pyrotechnic image — just the feeling of being under the gun of a soldier.

A kind of gnosis. And then I remembered — like a kind of revelation — of knowing.

I grew up in Cookstown, in the shadow of an army base. Soldiers regularly walked through our garden on foot patrol. With impunity — tough and hollowed-out young men from working-class northern English towns who had been drilled into being wary and disgusted by the Catholic youth.

I remembered standing under a Lynx or Gazelle helicopter — I still don’t really know the difference — but it was staffed with a gaggle of such youths, in military outfits, hanging out the side of the helicopter insanely low over my garden, and one of them, laughing, with me in the sights of a general-purpose machine gun rigged to the side of the open door. And then they flew away.

I was about seven or eight. The most chilling thing about this middle-of-the-night recollection — simulated in some way that I had absolutely no conscious lens on by the doctor’s report — was that I didn’t wet myself. I can now remember just going back to playing football in my garden — this tells me it was a common enough thing.

They probably did it a fair bit.

I had completely forgotten this — but “nap-of-the-earth” flying — bombing the helicopters very low across the terrain below the contours of the land — is an effective way to minimise the angles from which surface-to-air missiles can be launched. This, of course, is the official party line and operational reason.

But if you give bored, frustrated, and terrified young men in uniform, doing tedious foot patrols in the pissing rain, a helicopter to command — they are going to do things like this.

It was, of course, the below-deck justice that they were allowed to fly with impunity, and I now remember how they would fly basically like joyriders.

The sound of the rotors coming over time demoralised people — it was a constant sonic reminder that you are occupied. That we have eyes on you. We lord it quite literally over you, and if we wanted to — we could take aim and fire with impunity. You are always in our sights.

It was this deposition by a doctor who had no reason to lie, and my experience now as a therapist — to just shut up and listen as someone unloads the truth they wish was not the truth — that triggered this memory in me.

I did not want to believe it.

Because my experience of being terrorised by young men in a helicopter while I played football in my back garden is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared to the horrors of what children are now experiencing in Gaza.

The corroborated reports by journalists, photo-aide workers, and other such eyewitness testimonies reveal a disturbing pattern — children being shot whilst waiting in line to get food so they don’t starve. Clustering, so that shootings happen in patterns that would suggest they are now, ostensibly, living in an open-air shooting pen.

I did not want to believe this. But I have stood at the end of this impulse — this dehumanising impulse — of the angry and bored and brutalised young mind of the soldier.

The English squaddies who were brought into Northern Ireland under Operation Banner were bored and frightened. They often came from rough families and places where they felt powerless.

I understand the psyche of the soldier now — I had to.

I needed to understand why these young men — probably nice enough if you met them in their home town — had become so dehumanised they thought it would be good fun to hover over a small child and aim at them with a machine gun.

But the key difference here is that me and that soldier were tethered together in that moment. They flew impossibly low to the ground — you could see them hanging out, see them laughing, sometimes behind their gun.

The ways in which soldiers who are occupying people start to act, as their souls summon them to their own conscience, actually become unconscionable — they start to routinely do things you would never think possible.

It happened to the British military in Northern Ireland. And it is happening to the young Israeli soldiers who speak openly about how they want to see Gaza flattened.

They are being dehumanised by a military-industrial machine that does not care for them — only for the ends which their bodies can achieve for it. They are fodder, just like the people at the end of their ground- or air-aided scope.

There has been a call for divestment from Israel, and I understand this. I don’t know whether it is implicated or not, because I have — with hindsight, for obvious reasons of my own healing journey — not got enough information on this. But the divestment I can see happening now is between actor and action.

The soldier who put me in his crosshairs to assuage the creeping nightmare of his occupation of my lands — or to show off to his mates — or just because he was afraid and angry and wanted to act to feel less powerless — still had to be with me in that moment. He still had to see me. There was still a thin line of a tether. He, like the Tommies who came before him, was not divested from his bayonet.

We are living in an age where young men and women can sign up for militaries and enact violence on a scale which has us all gasping — waiting for the next, likely much larger, intake of breath — as we gasp with its power and potential to drive us all over a cliff.

Soldiers are the symptom, and what is happening in Gaza now shows us what is possible if we do not act.

I buried my head in the sand to protect my psyche from a state of trauma I thought I had dealt with. There is much more that I have dealt with — which is beyond the scope of this article — but as a therapist I can say that no one gets out alive when it comes to intergenerational trauma.

We are all linked together in this wound — this is a kind of interpersonal fact we all know and does not require any metaphysical claims.

I can say as an Irish person that we have a centuries-old sensibility and solidarity with occupied Palestine. And I can also say that as someone with an interest in the depth and esoterica, I have a strong sensibility for the Jewish people also. But all of these vague allegiances are nothing — absolutely nothing — compared to my position as a father.

I cannot divest from the future. The next hundred years — proximally and selfishly — belong to my children. They will likely, God willing, live through this next century. And so this constant lens we have on dead and dying children is no longer acceptable.

I cannot live in this world as a father.

I can turn away as a therapist, as a citizen, as an Irishman, and from my own cultural position — but I cannot turn away as a father.

Psychedelics have helped me personally and have been indispensable in first identifying layers of trauma that I had completely shut myself off from. This personal biographical history is not relevant — but the central animating principle which I have encountered again and again is the very simple statement that we are all one.

Now, as much as ever, we need to come back to this position, I believe. This notion that there is an “other” is wholly inconsistent with every single one of my experiences on psychedelics. This is not new-age proselytising — it is axiomatic. Psychedelics relaxed my axioms about who I was and what I could cope with. They released me from layers of ignorance about my own hurt and path to healing.

But they have done nothing to tighten to the central animating principle for me: of the whole kit and caboodle — there is not them, there is only us.

Identitarianism of any type — “the one is better than the other” — is nonsense. I know nothing, but I know this. And from it stems another very simple principle: war is silly. Don’t do it.

I did not know until a few days ago — until this doctor told his story of trying to save a little girl dying from an unmanned little drone of a helicopter — that I had experienced the same fear and bewilderment she would have felt.

But my helicopter was manned by another young boy in uniform who flew away. Hers was not manned at all — there was a machine called the military-industrial complex exploiting some soldier elsewhere to press a button.

And then turn away as she lay dying in the dust amongst the rubble of our own mechanistic hatred for one another.

I can turn away from that.