Jackie Danicki

This book by Judith Herman, M.D. was a real eye-opener for me. In fact, I’m going to have to read it again just to process all of the data and analysis it contains. (Check out the first 50 or so pages on Google Books.) Dr. Herman had me at the introduction:

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

Going into this book, my ideas about trauma - what “counts” as trauma, the ways in which a person may become traumatized, how it influences them - were pretty stupid. I suppose I had taken a fairly British attitude to such things, at least secretly; it sounds heartless to wonder aloud why someone can’t just get on with life after suffering trauma. I like to think I wasn’t so much heartless as I was ignorant and deluding myself. Only the most unfeeling person could read about some of the hardships suffered by the case studies in this book and expect them simply to muddle through and “be practical” (another common refrain). But maybe there’s another reason why dismissing trauma comes so easily to so many:

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering…

…After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

In short, dismissing trauma or urging that it be ignored (”gotten over”) aids those who visit horrible things upon entirely innocent victims. We should be careful about this, to put it mildly.

It turns out that there is no shortage of routes to trauma, from being kidnapped or a victim of terrorism to the sort of routine verbal and physical abuse that far too many people suffer. Just being yelled at every day over the course of growing up is enough to traumatize a child, and the coping mechanisms that kick in - while brilliant at helping the child survive - are devastating when carried over into adulthood. I really had no idea about any of this before I cracked open Dr. Herman’s book.

If you or someone you love has suffered trauma and you would like to learn more about it (good for you), I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s written in an extremely accessible, though not dumbed down, way. Sometimes these books fall apart by being overly academic, while Dr. Herman strikes a good balance - the entire book is easily readable and gives a sometimes emotionally overwhelming amount of compelling data. There are even specific chapters devoted to different types of trauma, so if you want to skip ahead to the one(s) relevant to you, it’s an even faster read. But the whole thing is worthwhile if you can bear to go that deeply into something so grim.

Filed under: Life