What Herman means by powerlessness and captivity

In Judith Herman’s framework (1992b), what makes an experience traumatic is structural. Trauma is an affliction of the powerless, in which the victim is rendered helpless not by the nature of the threat but by the foreclosure of response. “Traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self-defence becomes overwhelmed and disorganised.” Helplessness is the essential insult. Resistance and escape are blocked at the same time, in the face of a credible threat.

Powerlessness in Herman’s framework is not diffuse low status or generalised lack of influence. It is the structural impossibility of any effective response. The distinction between this and ordinary adversity is not a matter of severity but of architecture: can the person act? Can they leave? When a threat is present and the answer to both is no, Herman’s conditions are met.

Captivity holds the person by barriers that need not be physical. Economic dependency, social ties and accumulated investment hold just as powerfully. The resulting syndrome, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Complex PTSD), was formalised in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision (ICD-11) (WHO, 2019) as requiring exposure of an extremely threatening nature, most commonly prolonged or repeated, from which escape is difficult or impossible (Cloitre, 2020; Brewin et al., 2017). Its symptom clusters include the features of standard Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) plus three disturbances in self-organisation: affective dysregulation, a persistently negative self-concept, and interpersonal difficulties.

Herman’s framework runs across settings: she develops it in domestic violence, political imprisonment, cults and hostage-taking, and what carries across them is the mechanism — coercive control producing powerlessness and foreclosed exit — rather than the setting. The ICD-11 diagnostic criteria for Complex PTSD reflect this: they classify on symptom profile alone. Where the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) requires exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence, the ICD-11 criterion carries no such requirement (Brewin et al., 2017). The criterion reads: exposure to an event or series of events of an extremely threatening or horrific nature, most commonly prolonged or repetitive events from which escape is difficult or impossible (ICD-11, 6B41). A person can meet that criterion without ever leaving ordinary working life.

Where choices bind people by position and nothing requires the reasoning behind them to be given and questioned before those people must act, a person can spend a career unable to act on what they perceive and unable to be heard about it. DFS calls that architecture Hierarchical Decision-Making (HDM). Set inside an employment relationship, HDM is a root cause of psychological harm, and that harm runs by degree as far as Complex PTSD.

The criterion sets its threshold on how threatening the exposure is. The judgement behind it is that captivity and sustained powerlessness can reach that threshold in forms involving neither violence nor danger to life. Hyland et al. (2021) found that psychologically threatening events, among them bullying, emotional abuse and neglect, were as strongly associated with ICD-11 PTSD and Complex PTSD as standard life-threatening stressors. In multivariate analysis, only the psychologically threatening events, not the life-threatening ones, remained significantly associated with Complex PTSD.

What Herman’s settings have in common is not only the mechanism. Each of them has a captor. On her account, trauma that is prolonged and repeated arises only where the person is held by someone and cannot get away (Herman, 1992a). What this paper takes up is the same mechanism without the captor. The foreclosure of response is produced by HDM, the decision-making architecture almost every organisation runs on.

HDM forecloses the response: a person can see what will not work and has nowhere to bring it. The employment relationship supplies the other two conditions — what happens to a person when an outcome they were answerable for but could not influence does not arrive, and a price of leaving that rises with every year spent in one place. The rest of this paper shows how.