LITMIR.BIZ

       suturing the rupture: what writing about trauma can do

      This is my aftermath, this writing. This is where grief or something more unlanguage-able has brought me. Medicine is supposed to ease hurts, soothe spasms, turn the knots inside out, is supposed to quiet the voices, allow focus or a little joy or peace return, is supposed to settle the stomach or senses or skin, is supposed to make something better. This is homeopathic practice: writing brings me into the pain, the misunderstanding, the trauma, the loss, and turns them around for me to examine. There is an inoculation, a lancing and letting off of infection, a suturing together again. There is deep medicine in this, in bringing the terror up, shining a light on its vulnerable edges, then letting it back down. And there is an offering left in the aftermath, a transcription of procedure, a tracing the outline of a fragile, fractured, healing psyche and body. This artifact shows all the stages we go through: what we were, what fire we went through, how we shadowboxed and strove through to the other side to find what remained of our soul and pulled it back through to live again. (2013)

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      Trauma has impacted nearly every single person I know, directly and/or indirectly. Is this true for you, too? We may take trauma into our bodies and lives through our parents’ physical violence, or sexual misuse or molestation, through their name calling or threats or mind games or psychological torture. It may be an assault by a stranger, someone who took us by surprise on the street or in our home. It may be a natural disaster, like living through an earthquake or hurricane. It may be a physical illness, like cancer. It may be living under white supremacy, and/or other forms of oppression. It may be living or fighting in a warzone. It may be the legacy of our parents’ or grandparents’ traumas, our ancestors’ experiences of political, cultural, or intimate violences.

      Merriam-Webster defines trauma as, variously: an injury to the body (as a wound, a cut); a “disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury;” and an emotional upset. The word trauma derives from the Greek word traume, meaning “a wound, a hurt, a defeat.”

      A disorder state. A defeat.

      In my workshops, I define trauma, quite broadly, as any experience which confounds understanding, and which leaves a person feeling silenced: either without access to language to describe it, and/or unwitnessed/unheard/shut down when they attempted to speak about the experience. I think of a traumatic experience as one that causes damage to bodily or psychological or spiritual integrity, one we’re not able to immediately integrate or process, that overwhelms, and then transforms, our understanding of ourselves and our reality.

      A traumatic experience is generally thought of as something out of the norm—except, of course, for those living with incest or domestic violence, living in war zones, or experiencing political persecution or race-hatred: this is our normal.

      In its most recent criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic “bible” for psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and insurance companies, defines trauma as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence,” whether directly or indirectly. When I talk about it, I tend to expand this definition somewhat. Trauma is a site of shock in the body and/or psyche. It’s a rupture, a bifurcation, a disassembly. Trauma marks the moment when what was ended, and something new emerged.

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      But what was the moment of trauma? Sometimes you can’t ever put your finger on it. There is no warp of scar that separates the Before from the After. Not in this body. There is only the fuzzy and ephemeral, unmappable distance of memory. The way I cannot mark when it started. The way I cannot tell you, It was here, when he rubbed my back over my summer tank top. Or, no, it was here, when his hands lifted the tank top a week or a month or who could say how long later? And why am I still looking for this line of demarcation, the moment when that brown-haired girl on the couch went from a regular tomboy with a handsy stepdad to someone not exactly there anymore at all. But that’s how it is with ghosting. Could you say when exactly the Cheshire Cat began to disappear? You simply saw his whole curved self, a ball of striped, grinning fur, tucked up into that tree, and only after he was well into his evaporation did you begin to notice what was missing—by the time that understanding took hold, he was all and only teeth. No obvious moment when you could point and say, Look, his edges have blurred. The blurring comes across gradually. You don’t know, when it begins, that some part of you will be blurred, ungraspable, forever. You think it’s just going to be for a minute—just until he takes his hands back to himself. Just until your mom says something to him. But then he doesn’t take his hands back, and your mom presses her lips together tight, and those edges that thought they were just pretending, just practicing the art of disappearance, shimmer more finely, get harder and harder to feel again; you can’t make yourself reappear whenever you want to anymore, like the Cheshire Cat could. You don’t know that one day you, too, will be only teeth—and that then those sharp knowings will disappear from your grasp, too. (2015)

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      Many of the folks I’ve written with over the last decade are survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault or rape, extreme or ritual abuse. Others have survived or are living with cancer or other life-altering illness. Some have had to live with sexual harassment, neglect, emotional abuse, forced prostitution. Some will never have a name or a clear visual memory of their traumatic experience: instead what they have is a body telling them that something terrible happened. Often, these writers without specific memories reach hard for language that can put a name to physical sensations like nausea, nightmares, discomfort in certain situations, discomfort around certain people, depression, hyper-vigilance—that is, want to make sense of these symptoms of PTSD. Despite the DSM’s languaging of trauma as an experience that is “exceptional” or “out of the ordinary,” trauma is a common experience—it’s a rare person who has experienced nothing traumatic in their lives.

      Trauma lives in us in individual ways; through trauma, our relationship with language is ruptured. What has happened to us makes no sense because we cannot find words, because there are no right words to make anyone else truly understand. Our storyline fissures, and we fragment. We experience ourselves as voiceless, sometimes for many years. Trauma shocks us out of alignment; we are removed from our own story, and we have to, each of us, find and even create the language to articulate what we’ve been through and what we’ve become. We are left having to rebuild our whole narrative. The story of ourselves is what gets broken. The story of ourselves is what we have to suture together again.

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      In 1994, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old, you could find me most days holding up a table at a cafe on the edge of

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