In "Who Am I in a Traumatized and Traumatizing Society?," Franz Ruppert poses a question that sounds personal but turns out to be profoundly political: how can any of us develop a coherent sense of identity when the very societies we're born into are organized around unprocessed trauma? Ruppert, a German psychologist who has spent decades developing what he calls Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy (IoPT), argues that trauma doesn't just affect individuals. It saturates social structures, cultural norms, institutional practices, and the relational patterns through which identity forms. We are not merely individuals who happen to have been traumatized. We are beings whose deepest sense of self has been shaped—and often fragmented—by traumatic systems we may not even recognize as traumatic.

The book weaves together developmental psychology, attachment theory, trauma research, and social criticism into an analysis that is both intellectually ambitious and practically grounded. Ruppert traces how early relational trauma—particularly disruptions in the mother-child bond—creates splits within the psyche that persist into adulthood and shape everything from personal relationships to political allegiances to susceptibility to authoritarian ideologies. But he doesn't stop at the individual level. He extends his analysis to show how entire societies can become organized around the avoidance of collective trauma, creating institutions and cultural practices that perpetuate traumatic dynamics across generations. For IMHU's community, this book provides a crucial framework for understanding how individual psychological suffering connects to collective patterns, and why healing that addresses only the individual level—without confronting the traumatizing systems in which individuals are embedded—will always be incomplete.

Central to Ruppert's model is the idea that trauma doesn't just cause symptoms—it splits the psyche into distinct parts, each carrying different aspects of the person's experience. He identifies three primary parts that emerge in response to overwhelming experience: the healthy self, which retains the capacity for authentic feeling, clear perception, and genuine connection; the traumatized self, which holds the unbearable pain, terror, and helplessness of the traumatic experience; and the survival self, which develops strategies for managing life while keeping the traumatized parts hidden from awareness. Most of us, Ruppert argues, live primarily from our survival selves—functional, often highly competent, but disconnected from both our deepest pain and our deepest authenticity.

This framework has remarkable explanatory power for understanding why so many people feel a persistent sense of inauthenticity, emptiness, or disconnection even when their lives appear objectively successful. The survival self can achieve, perform, and maintain relationships, but it does so by suppressing the very parts of the psyche that carry genuine feeling and authentic selfhood. The cost of this suppression is a life that functions but doesn't feel fully real—a condition so widespread in modern societies that we've normalized it. Ruppert suggests that much of what we call "normal" adult functioning is actually sophisticated survival behavior, and that the epidemic of anxiety, depression, addiction, and existential emptiness in affluent societies reflects not individual pathology but the collective cost of living from fragmented selves in a society that rewards fragmentation.

One of Ruppert's more challenging claims is that the roots of identity fragmentation often extend back to the earliest stages of life—including prenatal experience and the conditions surrounding conception itself. He argues that the quality of the mother's emotional state during pregnancy, her own unresolved trauma, and the relational context into which the child is born all shape the developing psyche before conscious memory begins. A mother who is herself dissociated from her own traumatic experiences cannot provide the attuned, emotionally present bonding that the infant's developing self requires, not because she doesn't love her child but because trauma has limited her capacity for the kind of embodied, feeling-level connection that secure attachment demands.

This perspective extends the timeline of trauma far beyond the events we typically recognize as traumatic. It suggests that the earliest relational environment—including experiences for which we have no conscious memory—creates the template for our sense of self, our capacity for intimacy, and our relationship with our own emotions and bodily experience. This isn't about blaming mothers, as Ruppert is careful to emphasize. It's about recognizing that maternal capacity for attunement is itself shaped by the mother's own developmental history, her unresolved traumas, and the support or lack thereof provided by her partner, family, and society. Trauma transmission is a systemic phenomenon, not a matter of individual parental failure. The mother who can't fully bond with her infant is often a woman whose own bonding was disrupted, who lives in a society that fails to support the conditions mothers need to be genuinely present with their children.

Where Ruppert's analysis becomes most relevant to IMHU's concerns is in his extension of trauma theory to the social and institutional level. He argues that modern Western societies are themselves organized around unprocessed collective trauma—wars, colonization, industrialization, the severing of communal bonds—and that social institutions often function to perpetuate traumatic dynamics rather than heal them. Educational systems that demand conformity and suppress authentic self-expression. Economic systems that treat human beings as production units. Medical systems that fragment the person into organ systems and chemical imbalances. Political systems that exploit fear and division. Each of these can be understood as expressions of a traumatized society's survival strategies writ large.

The psychiatric system comes in for particular scrutiny. Ruppert argues that mainstream psychiatry's insistence on locating the source of suffering inside the individual's brain—rather than in the relational and social systems that shaped them—is itself a form of trauma perpetuation. When a person whose identity has been fragmented by early relational trauma and ongoing social violence is told that their distress is caused by a chemical imbalance, the traumatizing system effectively disappears from view. The person is medicated into functionality without the underlying fragmentation being addressed, and the social conditions that produced the fragmentation continue undisturbed. This analysis doesn't dismiss the reality of neurobiological factors in mental distress, but it insists that treating brains without addressing the traumatizing systems those brains develop within is both clinically inadequate and politically convenient for the systems in question.

Ruppert's therapeutic approach, IoPT, is designed specifically to address the identity fragmentation that he considers central to trauma's lasting effects. The method uses what he calls the "intention method"—the client formulates a sentence expressing their deepest intention for the session, and this intention becomes the gateway for accessing the split-off parts of the psyche. Through a process that involves resonance with others in a group setting, the traumatized and survival parts of the self gradually become visible, allowing the healthy self to witness and begin integrating what was previously too overwhelming to approach directly.

What distinguishes IoPT from many other trauma therapies is its focus on identity rather than events. The goal isn't primarily to process specific traumatic memories, though that may happen. It's to strengthen the healthy self's capacity to be present with all parts of the psyche—including the parts that carry unbearable pain—and to gradually reclaim the authentic identity that trauma forced underground. This orientation toward identity recovery rather than symptom reduction aligns with a spiritual understanding of healing as a process of becoming more fully oneself. While Ruppert doesn't frame his work in explicitly spiritual terms, the process of reconnecting with one's authentic self through compassionate self-witnessing has clear parallels with contemplative and spiritual traditions that understand healing as a return to wholeness. The fragmented self that Ruppert describes bears a striking resemblance to what many spiritual traditions would call a soul that has lost contact with its own depths.

The book's most important contribution may be its insistence that individual healing and social transformation are inseparable. A person can do deep therapeutic work to integrate their fragmented self, but if they return to a society that continues to operate through traumatizing dynamics, the conditions for re-fragmentation persist. Conversely, social reforms that don't address the psychological fragmentation of the people implementing them tend to reproduce traumatic patterns in new forms. Ruppert argues that genuine social change requires individuals who have done enough of their own healing to act from their healthy selves rather than their survival strategies—and that genuine individual healing requires confronting the social systems that perpetuate trauma.

This dual focus on inner and outer transformation resonates deeply with IMHU's understanding that mental health cannot be separated from the social, cultural, and—we might add—spiritual contexts in which people live. Ruppert's framework provides a sophisticated psychological account of why so many people who seek help for psychological distress find that individual therapy, while helpful, doesn't fully address their suffering. The missing piece often isn't better therapy or better medication. It's a confrontation with the traumatizing systems—familial, institutional, cultural—that produced and continue to maintain the fragmentation. For IMHU's community, this analysis supports the case for a mental health approach that's simultaneously personal and political, therapeutic and prophetic, attending to the individual soul while challenging the systems that wound it. The question the title poses—"Who am I?"—turns out to be unanswerable in purely individual terms. We discover who we are only by understanding the systems that shaped us, and by finding the courage to become more than those systems intended.