Like pretty much everyone else in the world right now, I have been obsessed with Hamilton for about a year. On about my thousandth listen of the song "Right Hand Man", which introduces General Washington, I noticed a line that tugged at my brain. Washington says
“Now I’m the model of a modern major general
The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all
Lining up, to put me up on a pedestal.”
I couldn’t get that line out of my head, so like any good millennial, I typed it into Google to see if I had heard it somewhere else. Mystery solved. “The model of a modern major general” is a line from The Pirates of Penzance, a comedic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. I am certain that at some point in my history in high school and college theater classes I have seen The Pirates of Penzance, so I thought that was the end of it. Then literally later that night, I had West Wing on in the background and President Bartlet says “talk about the model of a modern major general” (Season 4 Episode 14). My head snapped up. What are the chances? How crazy is it that I just looked that phrase up and I heard it again?
Enter Baader-Meinhof phenomenon; it is the feeling that you get when you learn the meaning of a new word or about a new idea then find it popping up in your life everywhere. Clearly, this happens to me all the time! Now from a logical perspective, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is really just your brain playing tricks on you as it desperately searches for patterns in the world around us. Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as "frequency illusion", is a combination of two psychological processes: selective attention, in which your brain pays more attention to things that you recently learned, and confirmation bias, which looks at information in ways that reinforce your preconceptions. Since your brain likes finding these patterns, most people get a surprised and satisfied sensation.
This is all well and good, but I never found Baader-Meinhof phenomenon to be pleasant; instead I focused on the fact that before I learned the new word or idea I had been missing out on a large part of the world. How many times before I have heard a reference to “the model of a modern major general” and just never understood what it meant? How many conversations have I misinterpreted because I didn't understand this reference? How much important information have I missed? I know that this seems over the top, but it really bothers me! This anxiety about the past happened when I learned about ACEs.
I grew up in special education classes. I am dyslexic. I was diagnosed, thanks in large part to my ever supportive mother, at the end of my first-grade year. I spent much of the next 11 years bouncing in and out of support classes and getting pulled out of ‘normal’ classes. Most of my close friendships were formed with other special education students. Particularly, once I reached middle school I had a tight-knit group of friends that all had classes together. We all had a range of diagnoses from dyslexia to ADHD and auditory processing. As I have been researching trauma and ACEs over the past two months, I feel like I have gained a new understanding of my friends and peers. Growing up I knew a lot of them did not come from good home lives, but I was so surrounded by peers who had divorced parents, were in foster care or felt neglected that it almost didn't register as abnormal in my 7th grade brain.
Learning about trauma and its effect on learning has been like finding a new word and wondering just how much I have missed my whole life, especially as a special education student. Not only do I now see the effect of ACEs and trauma all around me in my daily life, but I can't help but look backward and see my past in a new light.
In one particularly shattering moment, I took the time to reflect on one of my best friends from middle school; I counted that a rough estimate of her ACE score would be at least an 8 and that is only counting incidents that I saw or was directly told about. That revelation took me a few days and a text or two to her to check in to digest (she is doing great now, but we live in different states). That was the moment that the ACEs research sunk in for me. I had to put it in a personal context.
It is hard to not wonder if most of my friends even belonged in special education or if they had been placed there as a misguided attempt to help their "symptoms", all while disregarding their underlying trauma. This is a really hard realization to come to, but it has strengthened my commitment to trauma-informed care and increasing awareness about childhood trauma.
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