Unresolved Trauma
This book presents almost all displaced Karen as having experienced trauma due to six decades of civil war in Karen State, Burma. Many escaped this conflict by fleeing to Thailand where they now reside either locally in villages or refugee camps along its border with Burma – this displacemet and subsequent trauma being the basis for their activism in Burma.
So it is no surprise that when police encounter Karen they can activate their fight-flight-or-freeze response. Unresolved traumata interfere with normal brain functions by activating the amygdala and decreasing prefrontal cortex activity; which governs judgment, risk evaluation, impulse control, decision making and anticipating consequences – which essentially means when you experience trauma your mind remains stuck in survival mode and cannot make rational decisions.
For Karens living as refugees in Burma/Myanmar, their situation is compounded by lack of access to safe homes where they can relax and return to normal daily routines. Reducing stress levels is essential to healing, yet often difficult given ongoing struggles at borders – the Derrick front page story on September 8, 2014 provided an honest yet heart-wrenching depiction of this struggle.
Unresolved traumas often leave displaced Karen experiencing significant and prolonged psychological distress, leading them down a path towards posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression. Police personnel are particularly susceptible to these mental health disorders due to exposure to physical and psychological threat situations which increase exposure to potential physical threat exposures (PPTEs). This increases their chances of PTSD development or subclinical markers such as elevated SNS hyperarousal and dissociation from themselves (Syed et al. 2020).
There is mounting research which indicates the importance of adopting a trauma-informed approach to policing for both individual and organizational training purposes. Such an approach includes teaching officers various coping strategies designed to decrease ANS hyperarousal and return them back into their window of tolerance, so they can make rational decisions even during high-stress situations.
