An Introduction to the Concept of Trauma

This article was first published on the "Caesura" page.

When the members of a society live through massacre, war, severance from the world, repression and naked violence, terror and the sudden overturning of the conditions of life, some of them find themselves, without having chosen it, in a particular state of mind for which the best word — and perhaps also the least adequate one — is "trauma." Trauma (or psychic injury) refers to an emotional experience so intense that it exceeds the ordinary capacities of the psychic apparatus to manage and make meaning of events.

Although the effects and consequences of trauma are various and by no means uniform, in this introductory piece I want to look at five of its more common consequences, and also at what most fundamentally distinguishes trauma from the ordinary misfortunes of daily life.

To understand trauma properly, it seems to me, two things need to be kept in mind. First, whether an event is traumatic is determined not simply by the nature of the event itself but by its effects on the capacities of the psyche that receives it. This is why, in what follows, I will speak of the common consequences of trauma rather than of types of traumatic event. Second, although in everyday usage the word "trauma" is often reached for simply to signal the intensity of an experience, it is not the case that whatever is more shattering or more unexpected is, for that reason alone, more traumatic. The severity of an event increases the likelihood of its becoming traumatic — but only the likelihood. Put differently: people differ enormously from one another in temperament, in inherited disposition, in the experiences of their early development, and in the environments and circumstances in which they were raised, and these differences bear directly on how a given event is ultimately metabolized. What leaves a deep wound in one person's psyche may, in another, amount to little more than a surface scratch.

A Wound That Will Not Close

Under reasonably ordinary circumstances, the human mind is able to take in and digest a great many painful experiences. The suffering that follows a loss, a betrayal, a separation, an unrequited hope of one kind or another, may never entirely disappear, but the event, in the end, comes to belong to the past. A memory, or a constellation of painful memories, remains — for all its bitterness — a memory. The person can say what happened, what it felt like, and, within a more or less linear span of time, how that event changed the course of a life. The traumatic experience, however, does not submit to this kind of temporal order.

Sometimes what has happened is so sudden, so violent, so unimaginable, that the psyche cannot, with its ordinary resources, contain it within itself or, as we sometimes say, "close the file" on it. However hard we try, it seems, we cannot get the event behind us and move past it. The past experience returns to the present again and again, in a circling, seemingly causeless way — in nightmares, in a sudden image or sound, in bodily pain and tension, in anxiety or grief or an unnameable unease. A kind of ghost of the traumatic event comes, in this way, to occupy our life and our mind for a long time afterward. This repetitive, recurring quality is among the most important features of traumatic experience.

Collapse

Unlike the ordinary misfortunes of life, which we eventually manage to hold within the container of the psyche, in trauma that very container is damaged in such a way that it can no longer receive much of the raw material — the raw psychic input — that continues to arrive. The problem is not only unbearable pain and suffering; it is that the traumatized psyche cannot, in the first place, organize that pain into affect, into thought, into a coherent narrative. In psychoanalytic language: an ordinary painful event comes to be represented within the psychic apparatus, but a traumatic event damages the very capacity for representation.

In this respect, traumatic experience comes close to what we might call a psychic collapse. We can no longer even say, with any confidence, where the real pain is located, what it is we feel, or what it is we are looking for. What sets in is a profound sense of being lost — a state so disorienting that it resists being put into words at all.

Helplessness

Another central element of traumatic experience is a feeling of helplessness — the sense that no effective action remains available to us. Even though the entire apparatus of body and mind has mobilized itself for defense, it seems that fighting, fleeing, or altering the situation are all, somehow, no longer possible.

Body and mind, as a result, remain in a continual state of alarm and vigilance. Even periods of relative calm come to be experienced as the calm before a storm. A vicious cycle takes shape — of arousal, of scanning for danger, of avoidance — one that requires enormous physical and psychic energy simply to sustain. This severely narrows our capacity to step outside ourselves and re-engage with life.

Dissociation

Dissociation is among the experiences that most often travels alongside trauma. It is bound up so closely with the core of traumatic experience that some clinicians — though by no means all — make it the defining criterion of trauma itself: an event that produces dissociation is trauma; an event that does not is not.

Dissociation is one of the most primitive and fundamental of defense mechanisms, in which the mind, in its effort to bear an unbearable situation, keeps some portion of the experience out of the reach of awareness, so that the rest of life can continue.

In dissociation, it is not only our memory of the traumatic event and its aftershocks that becomes fragmented and incoherent; other regions of psychic life, too, can come to seem like scattered islands. The connection between feeling and thought comes apart. The self of before no longer resembles the self of now. Our sense of time itself is altered. How present we feel varies wildly from one moment to the next, and we often carry bodily symptoms that seem to bear little relation to whatever is happening, at that moment, in the mind or in the surrounding world.

And yet dissociation should not be taken simply as a sign of damage. Sometimes splitting off the unbearable parts of experience from the stream of consciousness is the only means the psyche has of avoiding total collapse. The trouble arises when this emergency state becomes fixed, permanent — and cuts the person off from affect, from relationship, from the very feeling of being alive.

Meaninglessness and Mistrust

A traumatic event disrupts not only the functioning of body and mind; it takes aim at the very "givens" by which we live. In the ordinary bitterness of life, some portion of our existence may be damaged, but the world, taken as a whole, remains intelligible to us. In trauma, by contrast, it is often the entire framework that had given experience its meaning that collapses. What had once been simply given — that tomorrow will more or less continue today; that one can trust one's own perception of the world and of others; that reality can be known and put into words — no longer seems given at all.

When the source of the wound is other human beings, or human institutions, this mistrust takes on a further dimension: not only does the surrounding world become unsafe, but the very possibility of human connection — of being seen, of being understood, and the basic expectation that another person's life and well-being carry weight for others — is called into question. Trauma, in this way, can defamiliarize our world and empty it of the very meanings we had built up in order to understand it.

It is important to remember that these five features are at once effects of the traumatic event and responses that the psyche mobilizes in order to bear it. The injury a given event inflicts is often met by defensive mechanisms that, for their part, persist and thereby keep the traumatic experience alive.

It should also be said that each person's pattern of response — depending on which aspect of trauma is most prominent for them — is singular, their own. What makes the trauma of the members of a group or a society "collective" is not that their reactions are identical, but that they have confronted shared catastrophes with relatively similar consequences. In other words, such catastrophes challenge — to varying degrees — a person's temporal ordering of experience, their sense of agency, their psychic coherence, and their capacity to trust, to make meaning, and to imagine a different future.

Payvand Jalali, Psychoanalytic Therapist