Weekend Perspectives: The trauma of Big Ben
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Big Ben will now wear a helmet off the field and is contrite. But the baffling question remains: Why did he court disaster by riding in heavy Pittsburgh traffic with an unprotected head?
Robert Schwartz, Ph.D., is president of Cognitive Dynamic Therapy Associates and adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (robsch@pitt.edu).
Various answers have surfaced. The simplest is that he is just stupid, pejoratively called "Big Dumb Roethlisberger" by one sports commentator. Another asks us to let up on Baby Ben; he was just acting his age, like any 24-year-old. A Temple University psychologist pegged him as having a high-risk taking or T-Personality, the "T" standing for the thrilling life that these people crave.
Ben offered his own reason: I believed an accident wouldn't happen to me.
But all of these explanations are lacking.
Calling someone stupid insults them, but explains nothing. As for being a risk-taker generally, Ben has forcefully denied this and all his other behaviors, off and on field, supports this view. Regarding age, 24 is not so young and Ben is renowned for his admirable maturity in both his public and private activities, motorcycling aside. Even younger adults have the good sense to wear helmets, particularly if riding a monster machine like the Suzuki Hayabusa, capable of going 186 mph.
As for Ben's explanation, when respected figures such as Coach Bill Cowher and Terry Bradshaw both warn that it could happen, wouldn't you begin to believe the obvious? And if he has been injured playing football, why not riding a motorcycle?
Ben is not a stupid, immature 24-year-old, high-risk taking kid. He is a young adult, the leader and spirit of the 2006 Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers who let himself and his fans down with this inexplicable lapse in judgment.
To find a satisfying answer we have to dig deeper, beyond the rational. A clue emerges in one stunning fact about Ben's early life: When he was 8 years old, Ben Roethlisberger's mother, Ida, was killed in a car accident.
Killed in a traffic accident ... a traffic accident. In a split instant mother is gone, a devastating loss.
Such traumatic loss often leaves an emotional scar that can unconsciously haunt a person throughout his life. This is particularly evident when the trauma occurs during the tender years of 7 to 12 because the child hasn't developed the cognitive capacity to adequately mourn a loss. Since the child can't fully deal with the loss, it gets submerged but remains a potentially active force in the unconscious mind.
This force can drive a person, without any direct awareness, to recreate aspects of the original trauma -- a mysterious but profound tendency that psychologists call the "compulsion to repeat." Since trauma involves life-threatening danger or emotional pain, the person is paradoxically drawn to re-enact situations that may seem positive on the surface, but also have potentially dangerous or painful elements as well.
The motive to repeat the trauma is a misguided attempt to master it by transforming the original feelings of passive helplessness into a sense of active mastery. The problem is that true mastery is never gained because the original trauma or loss is not dealt with directly. Thus, the person is compelled to repeatedly re-enact the dangerous behavior despite rational considerations.
A child with an abusive, alcoholic parent who hasn't resolved the traumatic experiences may marry a series of abusive spouses. The unconscious, futile wish is that by recreating a similar but more hopeful situation they will discover a better ending than what they found in childhood. The outcome is the opposite, namely more trauma.
A person whose parent died in an auto accident may derive temporary gratification from repeatedly attempting to master road dangers without being harmed -- until they actually are. As a practicing psychotherapist, I have seen many successful people whose loss of a parent in the pre-teen years complicated only a very circumscribed aspect of their otherwise extraordinary life.
Ben is not stupid, not too young to reason responsibly and not generally a natural risk-taker. He is a tragic hero with a nearly fatal flaw. But above all, he is a person who is driven towards mastery, someone who in two short years has mastered the NFL with intelligence, dignity and grace. If courting vehicular danger has been his futile attempt to master personal loss, let's hope for his sake and ours he will find a safer, more direct way to constructively deal with this unresolved life event.
Thinking things through more deeply and directly rather than re-enacting danger brings true mastery. This requires only a thinking cap, no helmet. And compassionate understanding, not ridicule, should be the public response.
First Published June 17, 2006 12:00 am
