I’ve been thinking recently of how trauma impacts people’s lives, having witnessed instances of abuse, neglect and sudden loss, and the pathologic consequences of these, in patients and friends. In searching for a metaphor, and failing, I began to read, and found this passage from Murakami’s After Dark that provided an insight:

“Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you’re an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I’m seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It’s evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It’s always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can’t exchange once it’s contaminated.”

Software is defined as “a set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks”. It isn’t a perfect metaphor, but it captures two things: that software is used in conjunction with hardware, which is, in our case, our bodies, and that software is used to execute tasks from this hardware. Which means that ideal software created with love and stability, tend to be more functional compared to damaged software which is marked by the lack of these things. It is hardly surprising then, that the majority of male felons tend to have experienced abuse in early childhood, that abused children are far more likely to develop a range of mental illnesses, and that the sharp decline of crime in the ’90s was caused by abortion being legalized two decades prior (meaning potential criminals, raised in unideal circumstances, were not being born).

The crucial difference, and where this metaphor falls short, is that our software isn’t as easily replaceable as that of a computer’s. As much as the fields of psychotherapy and psychotropics have progressed, there is only so much that can be done to heal early traumatic experiences, most of which involves understanding one’s history, and managing the wounds that have come as a result. We are a long way off from removing the software of trauma and its consequences, and installing a new one in its place.

It is one of the greatest blessings and curses of being alive – that our experiences, good or bad, are uniquely ours, and ours to manage; unable, as Murakami wrote, to be exchanged.