Always, As usual I enjoyed your thought provoking post. The Sudanese boys are an interesting case, as is the Vietnam war vets. I think one of the things that may have helped the Sudanese boys through was that actually did have a sense of identity: for many refuges it is 'us against the world' But as my therapist says [and Masterson echoes in his book] one of the abiding mysteries is why some people are relatively unscathed by trauma and others virtually destroyed, and again why some people heal and others don't. It is a bit like physical illness - some people succumb, and others don't.
I have thought a lot about why we are interested in understanding what has happened to our spouses, and for me, in part, it is that to heal fully I want to be as clear as I can about my past. I think we can't move on fully until we have come to terms with our past. And for most of us this past involves a large chunk of time spent with someone who radically changed.
My h also fully embraced my family, and I believe it was my mother's death [the final member of the much loved older generation] + some other stressors, that helped to push my h 'over the edge'.
There are a couple of other ideas floating around which partially fit with the 'masks' and personas they adopt. Jung's theory of the shadow self that is within us all, but is normally kept in check. Sometimes the Shadow takes over, and the person acts out all the repressed stuff that they had held in check.
Another theory [which my therpaist subscribes to] is that early trauma sits in the subconscious and unconscious, and the person lives their life by building a reality which ignores the trauma [unless they decide to address it] However, at some point the new reality can no longer sustain the fiction, and they either have to deal directly with the problems, or create another set of realities which embrace reality 1 and reality 2. This leaves VERY litle space for maneouver, and [according to my therapist] is why many cannot create a stable reality, but thresh around.
I hope I am reporting this accurately, but I found it interesting. I used to be very sceptical of psychotherapy, but I can now see value in it. Having said that, we still need to confront the matter of individual responsibility - we are not at teh mercy of our genes, our infant experiences and so on. We do have choice and free will, and for whatever reasons, our WAS have behaved horribly!
