“There is a certain relaxation, a safety, or maybe just a hint of sanity that comes with being able to see and lay a hand on the bars that hold a life captive and know with certainty that they are not imagined”.

—Wilkins (2020)

Vaughan Wilkins’ doctoral dissertation, entitled “Enculturated Captivity: The Ecopsychology of Collective Trauma”, explores the invisible bars of the modern world.

We find ourselves in an unprecedented age of ecological disconnection. The way we are collectively living on this planet is leading towards untold species extinctions, ecological collapse, and the eventual death of the living world. As an ecopsychologist I was asking the question, is the way we are living making us sick? Is our disconnection from a healthy ecology leading to our psychological issues and then are these psychological issues preventing us from attaining ecological health? In order to try and find the answer to that question I began studying another population that had lost their connection to their ecosystem and were suffering from those impacts — animals held captive in zoos. I was studying cooperation among African wild dogs held captive at the Bronx Zoo. This species has to collaborates together for survival. I was hoping to learn something from them because I think the same is more true for humans than we’d like to believe. However, the dogs at the zoo weren’t exhibiting any of their “wild” states of mind or behaviors, and as I began looking around the zoo more, I realized none of the animals were acting as one would expect from their non-captive relatives. Instead many were exhibiting abnormal, repetitive, and self-harming behaviors known as stereotypies or what many are now calling zoochosis. I wondered if that could be what is happening to modern humans — are we suffering from a form of zoochosis? And if so, what is the nature of our captivity, and where are the bars holding us captive? The collective developmental trauma that we experience points to a cage that is constructed through norms and conventions and a faulty definition of sanity that condones us living in a way that is killing our own life support system. By living in a way that is anti-ecological and hurting us, but then naming it sanity, we validate and condone it and then teach it to our kids. It becomes a secret cage that prevents us from living as functioning members of the earth community.

Collective Developmental Trauma

Enculturated captivity is the name I give to the hidden captivity, the invisible bars of the modern world. Enculturated captivity doesn’t refer to the experience of humans held in physical cages, C-PTSD is sufficient for that. Enculturated captivity identifies a set of thoughts and behaviors that we grow up in, imbibing them as a collective, and then passing them on to future generations. It has real and measurable psychological and physiological impacts and these impacts can exist across species.

Enculturated captivity combines the findings from developmental trauma, intergenerational trauma, and collective historical trauma. It highlights the environmental failures, psychological foreclosure, and somatic imprisonment inherent in this condition and shared across species lines in both human and nonhuman animals. Enculturated captivity is constructed through the cultural and intergenerational transmission of maladaptive biological survival and defense strategies. It is further compounded by the consensual validation of these strategies as normal and healthy allowing for the perpetuation of this collective, intergenerational form of developmental trauma.