Elian: Victim or Psychological Hype?

Tampa, Florida:  In a recent forum, Dr. Michael Hall, noted author and behavioral psychologist, disputed the popular theory that the events resulting in the forcible taking of Elian Gonzalez would permanently traumatize the child.

“Almost every psychologist I’ve seen interviewed on CNN, FOX, CBNS, and other mainstream news programs (ABC, NBC, CBS) have expressed the old psychoanalytic frame and behavioralistic viewpoint, that events, in and of themselves, traumatize,” Hall said.

“Yet events by themselves, do not traumatize,” Hall continued. “You have to take the event and give it an interpretation that frames it in terms of the trauma being personal, permanent, and pervasive.”

According to Dr. Hall, the psychologists who are predicting a gloomy future for Elian as a child doomed for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and therefore highly-likely to suffer a major depression, are actually participating in making those experiences happen. This, Hall said, is because as things are framed with that point of view, they plant this style of interpretation of permanent trauma as a likely possibility.

Dr. Hall calls this notion “utter nonsense.”

Events, he explained, do not enter into the brain or mind — only the ‘thoughts’ of those events. The individual must then map their understandings, beliefs, meanings, and values about events. These are what Hall refers to as “frames,” such “frames of reference,” “frames of awareness,” “frames of mind.”   “As we ‘frame’ them,” Hall said, “so we play out those frames.  This puts the major emphasis on our frames of reference and frames of mind as the determinators of our responses.”

“Framing Elian as a ‘victim,'” Hall went on, “is actually an attempt to support and further what I call ‘The Victim Frame Game.’ It’s one of the most prominent psychological games we play these days. We’re essentially saying, ‘If I think of myself as a victim and can get others to view me as a victim, I can get all kinds of sympathy, be excused of my negative emotions and behaviors, and not be expected to take effective action.’ The current predications of Elian’s future status, could well be affected the negative frames being predicted by psychologists and others who erroneously accept these concepts.”

What Elian also has on his side, Hall points out, is his age.  “Children are resilient, precisely because they do not have their frames set very well yet,” Hall explained.  “This gives tremendous power to Elian’s parents and others who will help to set those frames. They can choose to buy into the popular theory that Elian was a victim and was abused as a political ping pong in a vicious game, or they can re-frame his reference to show the triumph over the situation.” Hall noted that other  “children of survival,” such as those who grew up in a war zone (as in Lebanon), have come out without the internal strategy of “learned helplessness.”

“Elian’s experiences can be re-framed in a similar way, making him all the stronger and better for having this experience” Hall said.

So will Elian be traumatized by all the events?  It all depends.  Dr. Hall says that “it all depends upon the maps and frames that his dad and other family members provide him as a positive way to interpret things, and it depends upon the learnings that Elian himself buys and embraces.”

Dr. Michael Hall’s books include Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds, Figuring Out People, The Structure of Excellence, Dragon Slaying, Meta-States, and more than a dozen others, which have been translated into several languages.  An international trainer, author, and speaker, Dr. Hall has helped hundreds of people to overcome trauma, re-frame their lives, and create a powerful existence.