Trauma

Trauma

For “trauma” the OED gives us “a deeply distressing experience; emotional shock following a stressful event”. The word comes from the Greek for “wound”; in medicine it means “physical injury”. These words are all on the button. Not just distressing but deeply distressing; a certain type of experience not just an external event (there is something it is like to be traumatized); an emotional shock, sudden and surprising, not just an episode; causing a wound akin to physical injury (like losing a limb) not just a bruise. When subject to trauma the person is traumatized—changed, internally altered, sometimes extremely. I experienced three traumas in a row: professional, personal, and medical. I don’t want to go over the gory details; I want to draw some general conclusions. What is the meaning of trauma? What does it do to the psyche? It is an assault on the self, but it doesn’t kill you (though it can lead to suicide); you have to live with it (it has its own life). It becomes your daily companion. You wake up with it writhing inside you and you go to sleep at night with it still there; you may dream about it constantly. It is forceful and dominating. It causes withdrawal, distrust, uncertainty—you feel that anything might happen at any time, for no reason. In particular, it alters your attitude to other people: you lose confidence in people. It is like losing confidence in your body in serious illness: you feel let down by what you took for granted. Your body becomes your enemy not your friend, as other people become enemies not friends. You seek ways to minimize it, but you know it will never go away: this is now your life, your new reality. It won’t heal (hence deep). Other distressing experiences become harder to deal with—the death of a friend or pet. You have to monitor your state of mental health and not overburden yourself. Unfortunately, this means that you have less space and time for others: you become more self-centered. This is not good. An ill person must focus on his or her own well-being, neglecting other people; so it is with an emotionally traumatized person. There isn’t much that is positive about it. The feeling is sharp and raw, and the associated behavior can be abrupt and impatient. The traumatized individual needs to be given some slack; he is not what he once was. He belongs to another world now. It is not surprising that violence can result, verbal or physical. Not only do you not suffer fools gladly; you don’t suffer them at all.

The most interesting question to me is whether trauma brings new knowledge (in general trauma is not interesting). Does the traumatized person know things the untraumatized don’t? I think the answer is a tentative yes, but not in the cliched sense that it makes you more empathetic or thankful for small things. Rather, it gives you knowledge of the precariousness of human existence: things are going along swimmingly and then suddenly, shockingly, you are wounded deeply, mortally. Your life feels under threat, literally or figuratively. Your normal equilibrium is destroyed. Someone or something is trying to kill you—mentally or physically. They are removing your life support. The world is out to get you and it will not stop. It knows no reason or compassion or human decency; it is a killing machine. The person you once were is no more, just fragments remain. It is a kind of negative metamorphosis: from strong and healthy to crippled and sick. Cancer is a good analogy: it invades you, assaults you, reduces you to a miserable state. It engulfs and cancels. It traumatizes the body and the mind. Other types of psychological trauma also ferociously assail you—they want you dead. But you aren’t dead—you are a living vessel of psychic ruin. Trauma is all about death in one way or another—grief, sorrow, loss. So, what you learn is that death is waiting its opportunity, that it is just around the corner, lurking, unsmiling. Trauma is all about personal destruction. That’s why the death of a loved one can be so traumatizing; in some cases that loved one is yourself. If you knowingly traumatize someone, you are knowingly killing them—psychologically, spiritually. It is soul murder. I think it is good that the concept now exists and is routinely employed, because the phenomenon is only too real. There should really be a whole taxonomy of trauma, ranging from minor to annihilating. People should talk about their traumas, share them, have trauma parties. Trauma therapy should be free of charge. Trauma education should be mandatory. Trauma should be respected. There should be trauma nurses. You may learn something you didn’t know before by being made subject to it, though you may wish you never acquired this piece of knowledge. Hell, there should be a trauma philosophy.[1]

[1] Isn’t hell a place of endless trauma as well as endless torment? Torture causes pain now and trauma later. Battle trauma is the most obvious case, with a visible cause, but trauma comes in many forms, many not visible. Memory is integral to it—the vivid recollection of particularly awful experiences. If trauma could be weaponized, it would be (and has been in some cases).