I’ve always been wondering about that paradox of people saying “I’m an animal lover”, but at the same time eating animals. Having recently listened to one of Always For Animal Rights’ podcasts - an interview with vegan anthrozoologist and social scientist Lynda Korimboccus – I’ve had reason to think about it some more and wonder just how much trauma and dissociation play into that paradox.
Lynda coined the term of the “Peppa Pig paradox”, which applies specifically to people expressing love for a certain species of animals and then eating that very same species. The children’s cartoon Peppa Pig is a perfect example for this. During the interview, she and the host Carolyn discuss different examples of the paradox and the causes for it. I have long since speculated that dissociation plays a role in it and Lynda rang a bell for me when she said that “people have these inner barriers”.
Dissociation means to disconnect from your feelings (emotions and body sensations) and is a natural protective reaction to trauma. Trauma happens when someone feels overwhelmed and has no adequate support for it. Trauma is not the event itself, but the body’s reaction to it. If someone has experienced trauma in their childhood, they are much more likely to continue to be traumatised in their adulthood, because trauma affects a child’s development profoundly, especially their nervous system and ability to regulate their emotions (at what age the trauma happened and whether it was ongoing trauma are key questions here).
In some of my earlier articles I have mentioned the so-called vegan’s trauma or vystopia (terms coined by psychologists Shiri Raz and Clare Mann respectively), which describes the experience of brainwash fall-out and overwhelm in the face of the horrid reality of animal abuse that many people experience when they become vegan. So I would assume that they somehow manage to stay untraumatised before that – they’d transition from the complete and genuine ignorance of early childhood (where mostly no one points out to them that they are actually eating animals) into a state of dissociation (as older children or teenagers, I’d suppose), where they cognitively “know” what they are eating, but emotionally disconnect from this knowledge.
Time and time again people have said that they simply didn’t think about what they were eating before they became vegetarian or vegan. On the other hand, they can’t deny that they must have known it. So the cognitive knowledge must be successfully kept away from the emotions by dissociative walls the whole time
Having a Dissociative Identity, I know just how powerful dissociation is. And if it’s possible to disconnect completely from trauma, then I guess it’s perfectly possible to disconnect from any sort of knowledge that just threatens with trauma. In other words, the subconsciousness of carnists has to work to keep them from thinking about what they eat or the implications of other animal abuse that they support. This is facilitated enormously by society and capitalism, which go out of their way to normalise speciesism.
When you look at the reactions of carnists to vegan activism, just vegans saying they are vegan, or the existence of veganism in general, it’s easy to note that a lot of them get strongly triggered. For all of them, their emotional balance is threatened by what they are running away from the whole time without knowing it (the truth). This is stressful alone, and for many of them this also triggers something else, because so many people have experienced childhood trauma without knowing it – so these people will feel extremely threatened, possibly experiencing emotional flashbacks of being criticised or frightened as a child (and not having had adequate support for that). I think it’s this mixture of triggers which creates the often extreme reactions to veganism we see in our society (not to mention the gaslighting and mind games applied especially by institutions to ostracise vegans and make THEM appear extreme and – paradoxically- paradoxical).
Moving on, I’m also intrigued by the question of which personality parts are involved in the Peppa Pig paradox. As Lynda said, most little children really don’t know what it is they are eating, so there is no dissociation going on for them about this. But what about everyone else?
I would say that whenever we connect emotionally to another being, there will be a child part involved. After all our attachment starts before we are even born and can be termed the number one survival instinct of young children (leading to the tragedy of abused children attaching to their abusive parents, simply because that’s what their brains are hardwired to do in order to survive). Relating and connecting are at the core of what makes us human and it makes us open and vulnerable. And when it comes to animals, we all know that children love animals.
So any adult petting an animal in a true expression of feeling, will be connecting to their inner child. And it’s probably this part (or several child parts) that proclaims how much they love animals. But when they go to the supermarket, when they choose what to buy, and later on cook it, an adult part will be at work. They will go through a routine and make decisions that have nothing to do whatsoever with the experience of their child part petting an animal.
I’ve seen vegan outreach encouraging people to “make the connection”. You could call it making the connection between their cognitive knowledge and their emotions, and on a more deeper psychological level it’s about reconnecting with their child part(s).
I would hypothesise that people who in general are more connected to their inner child will find it easiest to transition to vegetarianism and veganism. Each person’s psyche is of course extremely complex though, so you will find more paradoxes like narcissist vegans (no one’s more disconnected from their emotions than narcissists), or highly sensitive, compassionate people who are carnist. After all, so many different factors play into whether someone is carnist, vegetarian, or vegan. And if someone is very disconnected from their inner child, then that will be due to trauma. Opening themselves up to anything that makes them reconnect to that part, might bring about a chain reaction of emotional responses and flashbacks.
This is why I always say that basically what would be needed for significantly more people becoming vegan would be trauma-aware counselling. But this is also why I don’t support animal rights activism that uses violent information. You could say that it’s not humanist or even truly vegan, as humans are animals too and get damaged by violence. It is also not intersectional, because it doesn’t think about the individual backgrounds of each person and how different people will be affected differently – the most vulnerable (such as children and traumatised people) being most damaged by violence of course. Last but not least, using violence of any form is abusive. If you want to inform about violence and oppose it, you need to do so without utilising the violence yourself. You need to be respectful and gentle. But of course most people don’t know that, unless they are trauma-aware (which is not an excuse).
To summarise: Carnists dissociate from the knowledge of what they are consuming. Their cognitive knowledge is disconnected from their emotions. If they care about animals in some way, this connection will probably be felt most strongly by their inner child part(s) of their personality. In order to (re)connect with animals, carnists need to reconnect with their inner child part(s).
Therefore, vegan outreach that aims to support and empower the adult part(s) in their role as a responsible protector and nurturer of child part(s) should go a long way at reaching non-vegan people. This might look like acknowledging their fear of change and the upsetting information, but also to help make the person feel safe by giving them a sense of control and agency, for example with a simple plan to approach vegan diet, overviews of support, and focusing more on the “what you can do about it” than the “this is what is horrible”. Empowerment and support are key to prevent trauma.