every time i see a post talking about how alfred pennyworth failed bruce for not getting him into therapy as a kid i want to scream.
it did not exist. the idea that children could have PTSD was just starting to be discussed in the late 80s/early 90s at the FRINGE of child psychology, and then trauma therapy even for adults spent an unhelpful 2ish decades dominated by forced-conversation talk therapy. that’s a thing that is detrimental to trauma recovery, because if someone doesn’t feel safe or in control of the dialogue about their trauma and is repeatedly asked to describe their trauma when they’re uneasy, it COMPOUNDS TRAUMA AND FEELINGS OF DANGER.
when bruce was a kid, even the best psychs available would have had training that taught them kids bounce back, that kids don’t respond to or handle trauma the way adults do, and that any behaviors post-trauma were almost certainly unrelated mental illness.
i see this esp in fandom circles but a gentle reminder that therapy even when it’s good doesn’t fix everything. even if bruce had HAD access to good childhood PTSD therapy, he would still have grief, he would still potentially be socially awkward or withdrawn, he might have still decided to be Batman because it’s a comic book where being a vigilante isn’t as wild as it is irl.
therapy requires honesty, readiness, safety, sound application of theory, an accurate picture of life outside the therapy room (self-reporting is often flawed!), consistency, and more! it can help but it doesn’t erase trauma or grief. it’s dismissive of the history of trauma therapy to say an adult “should have” had a kid in a therapy approach that didn’t exist, and it’s dismissive of the actual work of therapy to act like therapy would have made everything ideal. bruce isn’t going to be a normal, well-adjusted adult because his parents were murdered in front of him. he could be happy! he could have coping skills! but honestly it would be weirder if he didn’t wrestle with residual trauma and grief throughout his life.
and maybe this is just because i love Batman, and love specifically Batman as a symbol/figure of hope and sacrifice and the belief that every life matters, but I don’t think the worst ending here is Bruce deciding to give up a lot of his time, energy, and health to work in Gotham AND then choose to parent a traumatized child and actively meet his needs. like you think the alternative is that Alfred is a better parent by getting him into non-existent therapy and then he stays comfortably wealthy at home and is just another rich dude? that’s the ideal version? the one who can’t help Dick Grayson because Dick Grayson wants to run away and murder a man?
anyway tl;dr alfred should have flaws, yes, but there’s a big gap between “flawed human parental figure” and “man who massively failed Bruce in multiple ways, one of which was not putting him in therapy.”
just fyi bc i don’t think i made it clear: even in the initial decade of acceptance of childhood PTSD, the approach would have been a therapist asking bruce to describe the night his parents died. over. and over. and over. and over.
because of the belief that discussing it would process the trauma.
there were kids in foster care in this era that flat-out refused to go to therapy or speak at all while there because therapy was them being asked to describe, in detail, exactly what the abuse was, on repeat. it hurt a LOT of people even while we were struggling to get better at treating them.
Y’all. PTSD wasn’t even an official diagnosis in the DSM until 1980 (DSM-III). And even then, it was *controversial* in the field, because it was due to an external stressor. (Never mind that ‘refrigerator mothers’ had been blamed for psychotic symptoms for decades at that point because misogyny.)
Plus, you have to think about the fact that, initially, a stressor that met criteria for a diagnosis included things like combat, natural disaster/situation in which your life was in danger, or sexual assault. Although, this wasn’t explicitly stated. The criteria just said ‘Existence of a recognizable stressor that would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone.’ This was updated in the revised version to specify that a traumatic event included ‘serious threat to one’s life or physical integrity; serious threat or harm to one’s children, spouse, or other close relatives and friends; sudden destruction of one’s home or community; or seeing another person who has recently been, or is being, seriously injured or killed as the result of an accident or physical violence.’
How old is Bruce Wayne currently? If he’s roughly 30 or older, it’s unlikely he would have had access to treatment with someone who specialized in effective treatment of PTSD in kids. And if he’s younger? What do you think the odds are that a dude two generations older would shatter the stigma norms and take a kid to therapy?
As my elderly father would say: slim to none.
Plus, Bruce was originated in 1915. Talk therapy wasn’t even a thing in the US then. Although there’s evidence that Rhazes, a Persian physician, used a form of psychotherapy based on theory, it wasn’t a thing in the modern ‘west’ until Sigmund Freud in the late 1800’s. And he brought it to the US in 1909, but it wasn’t really popular until the ‘30s/‘40s. And psychoanalysis is not really a peer-reviewed, empirically-supported treatment for PTSD. Even though that standard is not without critique, it’s the one most treatment in the US is currently based on.
And Prolonged Exposure, an empirically supported treatment (that doesn’t mean that it works for everyone, just that it’s better than supportive therapy for the majority of participants in a randomized controlled trial) is based on reversing avoidance. Avoidance is like the lighter fluid of the fire that is PTSD symptoms—while it may help escape pain in the short term, it doesn’t resolve symptoms in the long term.
Being able to revisit traumatic events in a space *where there is objective safety* can help a person reprocess those events in an effective way that wasn’t available to them at the time of the event, when survival was the primary goal. And it’s not the only treatment out there; a person can recover without it (though some studies show that, when added to other emotion regulation skills, it leads to longer-lasting recovery from PTSD than those skills alone).
Anywho. I got started and couldn’t stop talking about two of my favorite things: human psychology and the history of psychotherapy.
If I may add a bit to this incredible analysis:
Here is the current definition of trauma under the criteria for PTSD (for individuals 6 years and older, where Bruce would be even directly after his parents’ deaths) in the DSM-V-TR, the new and current text revision that the field is using:
“A. Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:
1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).
2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.
3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of a family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.
4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse).
Note: Criterion A4 does not apply to exposure through electronic media, televi-sion, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.”
The DSM goes on to clarify what types of events and experiences this may include under the Diagnostic Features section, but my main point here is this: We are still, even now, continually growing in and modifying our clinical understanding of what trauma looks like and the many ways it can impact children and adults, both in terms of acute symptomology and long-term effects of prolonged stress. It is only in recent years that diagnostic criteria have been expanded to include not just the direct experience of an event but also witnessing or being indirectly exposed to it. As our understanding grows and evolves, so will our definitions of trauma (as well as the way we use the DSM in treatment, which is a point of controversy for counselors in particular, who strive to use the wellness model instead of the medical model that psychiatry uses in our understanding of pathology, but that’s another issue). So, yeah, PTSD really would not have been a viable diagnosis for Bruce to be given, much less receive adequate treatment for, as a child– no matter what year you drop him into as an adult.
The generation gap between him and Alfred was also mentioned above, and that’s definitely a factor here. Again, no matter what year you decide to drop Alfred and tiny Bruce into, Alfred would have been raised in a generation of people that, unless they were working directly in the field or had directly received beneficial treatments from it (emphasis on beneficial), would have seriously doubted the efficacy and general need for psychotherapy. A man who was a member of the Baby Boomers or an earlier generation would likely have been socialized to believe that the way you get through hardship is to shove it deep down and move on to rebuild a new life, that the only emotion that it is acceptable for a man to display is anger, that you simply must pick yourself up by your bootstraps and carry on. One of the reasons we are now seeing such a mental health crisis for men in particular is that we have generation upon generation upon generation of men who have experienced deeply traumatizing things but have never learned that there is strength in vulnerability, that bottling things up is not an adequate long-term solution to handling stress and trauma. With this mentality and these generation gaps in mind, Alfred, having experienced his own sudden loss of people he deeply loved in Bruce’s parents, responded to his own grief and pain in the best way he knew how: By setting it aside so that he could focus his care on a grieving little boy who desperately needed him.
Alfred is human, yes, but I fully believe he did the very best he could for Bruce with the knowledge and resources he had at the time. He loved that boy, and all things considered, that love did a lot to serve as a protective factor for Bruce to develop resilience as he grew into an adult.
Last week, for a class, I wrote a case conceptualization for Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne as he stands at the end of Batman Begins, diagnosing him with PTSD. At this point, Bruce has been Batman for… maybe a week, tops. He’s just turned 30, he hasn’t even met the Joker yet, he’s still establishing himself as a vigilante. For my conceptualization, I had Bruce “complete” the self-report Life Events Checklist (LEC) to identify the types of potentially distressing events he has experienced in his lifetime, and to lend support to my diagnostic rationale, and by the end of the first movie alone, in just one adaptation, Bruce has directly experienced or witnessed the following:
-Fire or explosion
-Transportation accident (for example, car accident, boat accident, train wreck, plane crash)
-Exposure to toxic substance (for example, dangerous chemicals, radiation)
-Physical assault (for example, being attacked, hit, slapped, kicked, beaten up)
-Assault with a weapon (for example, being shot, stabbed, threatened with a knife, gun, bomb)
-Captivity (for example, being kidnapped, abducted, held hostage, prisoner of war)
-Severe human suffering
-Sudden, violent death (for example, homicide, suicide)
-Sudden, unexpected death of someone close to you
-Serious injury, harm or death you caused to someone else
-Other very stressful events or experiences
…Yeah. It’s a lot. And again, this is just in Batman Begins alone. Given this context, it’s an honest miracle that Bruce turned out the way he did– deeply flawed at times, yes, and still wearing his grief like a shroud, but also incredibly resilient. He was able to take the evil that happened to him in his childhood and turn it around into a force for good as an adult, to commit himself to the perseveration of life and protection of others so that other children won’t have to experience what he did, and that shows a remarkable level of inner strength. Resilience in children has been found to be shaped largely by a stable, safe environment and consistently supportive caregiving, and Bruce had all that in Alfred.
As much as I enjoy some “Bruce goes to therapy as an adult” concepts, and I think he particularly needed to go after losing Jason… he still turned out alright, all things considered, and that’s largely because he had Alfred by his side, showing him deep, unconditional love. No Alfred Pennyworth hate in this house, please and thank you.
[id: a poster showing the buds of 28 different deciduous trees commonly found in the UK. beneath the English name for each tree is its name in Gaeilge. /end id]
I would have been such a faggy lil caveboy, they’d be like “grug come learn hunt and throw spear now” and id be like waaaa no let me pick berry with old gran. I’m the best berrypicker and all the elders love me and are soso sad seeing me cry getting dragged off to do hunting.
At dark around the fire, uup the wise would say some shit like “different flower bloom different way, let grug bloom” and everyone would be like “aaaaaa thog see now, thank you uup the wise.” so next day im allowed to pick berry and seed with old gran again and she lets me eat the juiciest ones (o^－^o)
