At The Fork in the
Road: Trauma Healing
By Nancy Good
Sider, MSW.
Note: This article was
originally published in Conciliation Quarterly, a publication of
Mennonite Conciliation Services, Spring 2001; Vol. 20, No. 2. Used by
permission.
As peacebuilders, we must
learn to recognize and examine the trauma that often smolders beneath conflict.
We might be able to provide a quick fix, but we can't transform the presenting
conflict without uncovering -- or somehow attending to -- the underlying trauma.
The conflict can actually worsen. Victims are re-traumatized and, if the trauma
goes unhealed, the victim may become the aggressor; the abused may become the
abuser.
Peacebuilders make peace
everyday with the picture of dead bodies before their eyes and the sound of
bombing in their ears. In order to transform conflict in these situations, the
peacebuilder must first address the rage, anger, outrage and denial that results
from this trauma.
The further risk to
peacebuilders in ignoring trauma is the potential for peacebuilders themselves
to become traumatized (or paralyzed) by not recognizing the power and danger of
working in intense trauma conflict-filled areas. Researchers have named this
occurrence as vicarious traumatization or secondary traumatization (Journal of
Traumatic Stress, 1990). This phenomenon looks at how caregivers can be as
susceptible to a similar traumatization as the primary victims. We do not need
to have the actual physical events occur to us directly to be traumatized.
Reliving them mentally can have a similar emotional effect to the direct
violence that occurred. This provides another reason for peacebuilders working
in trauma conflict situations to understand trauma and trauma
healing.
Description of Trauma
Ordinary stress is common
in all our lives. We know that a healthy amount of stress in our lives helps us
feel alive and stimulated. However, when we feel unable to cope with important
demands or expectations placed upon us, we experience distress. This distress is
different from traumatic stress in that it is gradual and less
intense.
Traumatic stress is a
piercingly intense, surprising occurrence outside the range of usual human
experience. It would frighten almost anyone. Following the genocide in Rwanda, a
children's booklet defined trauma as, "a normal response to an abnormal
situation when something scary or bad happens to you."
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Ordinary
Stress
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Traumatic
Stress
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- Piercing intensity; shock to system
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- Able to plan and problem-solve
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- Overwhelming sense of helplessness
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- People affected differently
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- Terror; frightens almost anyone
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Trauma may be caused by
destructive acts of nature (earthquakes, tornado, flash floods) or accidents
(car/plane crashes causing disability or death) resulting in sudden, significant
loss. A more pernicious form of trauma may be caused by violence, injustice or
wrongdoing at the hands of another person or group. It is this latter type of
trauma that is the focus of this article.
Trauma Healing
Map
 (Adapted from cycle of
violence and aggression by Olga Botcharova, while working at the Center for
International Studies.) Click image for larger view—>
Trauma healing entails
recognizing and reconciling trauma. It can be seen as a map of concentric
circles. The inner circle may be towards a natural, instinctive revenge journey
and the outer circle may follow a journey moving towards reconciliation. The
inner circle might describe how to recognize trauma-based conflict and the outer
circle would describe how to reconcile trauma-based conflict.
Recognizing
Trauma: the "Inner Circle"
- Realization of Loss
- Filled with the fear of
realizing the horrible truth mixed with the fear of looking into the
future
- Overwhelmed to imagine
life without that which we lost
- The more dramatic and sudden the change is, the greater the sense of
loss experienced
- Denial and the Suppression of Grief/Fears
- Trauma destroys our sense of security in the world; denial allows us to
let in only as much pain as we can tolerate at one time
- Denial and suppression are common survival mechanisms which help us pace
ourselves through the process of adjusting to catastrophic loss
- In
trying to avoid pain, we do everything to not get deeply into the grief or
confront the fears of past and future
- Circumstances in many conflict situations are usually not favorable for
the time needed for lamenting and mourning
- Anger: "Why me?"
- Allowing oneself to feel the fury of hate and anger, especially when one
has been abused, violated or severely wronged, is often a healthy part of the
recovery process
- Feeling anger toward the perpetrator(s) may be the only resource
available that allows some personal respect to be maintained
- Anger turned inward is often evidenced by the question: "Did I do
something to cause this?"
- Desire for Justice/Revenge
- Punitive justice may turn into a quest or crusade for
revenge
- While rage and revenge fantasies appear initially to bring relief, the
opposite is true. Repetitive revenge fantasies actually increase the victim's
torment, making the survivor feel like a monster---'just like them'
(Herman)
- Telling and Re-Telling the "Right" Conflict Story
- Creating myths/heroes that play well in the revenge conflict story
- Writing a history that supports the "ingroup" (victim's group) and
demonizes the "outgroup"(offender/enemy group)
- Placing the blame entirely on the "other" so victim needs to take no
responsibility
- Act of "Justified Aggression"
- Victim becomes the aggressor who victimizes and continues around the
inner circle again, now as the aggressor but believing self to still be
victim
Reconciling Trauma: the "Outer
Circle"
- Mourning and Expressing Deep Grief
- Knowledge that grief experienced does dissolve over time
- Often a fear of being overcome if one allows the tears to
flow
- Seeing some glimpse of new life even as the ashes are brushed
away
- Accepting Loss and Confronting Fears
- Survivors need to (1) separate themselves from the events that have
happened to them; and (2) integrate the events into their lives
- Integrating the grief and pain by deciding to heal, believing and
understanding what happened and trusting yourself
- Deciding to remember and move on
- "Why Them?" Re-humanizing the Enemy
- Moving from total victim self-absorption to some recognition of the
other
- Curiosity about how the "other" got involved; seeing the common humanity
in the other; the survivor begins the slow transformation and may even feel the
hidden pain of the abuser
- Realizing that not punishing the "other" does not mean forgetting what
happened, but rather recognizing that we can never truly get even and that an
inner peace comes when we give up trying
- Seeing the Divinity in the enemy
- Moving Beyond Tolerance
- A
beginning baby step of trust beyond a willingness to just co-exist
- Finding a survivor mission--some meaning in the ashes
- Choice to Forgive; Commitment to Take Risks
- Not at all forgive and forget
- Ability to transform the impulse for revenge into a search for something
larger
- Realizing that nothing we do to punish another person or group will heal
ourselves
- Seeing that this frees us to put to better use the energies once
consumed by holding grudges, harboring resentments and nursing unhealed
wounds
- "Re-Writing" History, Negotiating Solutions and Joint
Planning
- Revising the trauma story to be both honest and
constructive
- Walking through history together, openly examining wounds on all sides,
sorting out truth from falsehood and recognizing mutual
responsibilities
- Sincere apology, symbols of repentance and an open confirmation of good
will
- The trauma prisoner/survivor needs to make some sense out of the
suffering--"to find some purpose and meaning in the suffering" (Frankl, Man's
Search for Meaning, 1959)
- Establishing Justice That Restores
- Restorative justice which focuses on relationship and
restitution
- Restoring victims as well as offenders to the community
- Repairing the social injury and right relationship
- Moving Toward Reconciliation and Trauma-based Conflict
Transformation
- Does not mean that I forget what has happened--or condone it in any way.
Forgiving and forgetting is precisely what has disallowed many from achieving
true forgiveness
Three general
guidelines as we consider the two circles on this map:
- Trauma healing is both a decision and a process. The initial
choice involves the decision to move toward healing or stay in the
react/revenge/get even inner cycle. Trauma healing is also a process, in that it
entails my being patient with myself (and others if a whole community is
traumatized) as I go through this journey.
- Trauma healing is not one directional. It clearly is not linear.
Like the grief stages, a person jumps around rather than follow a tidy
progression from one stage to the next. Trauma healing, like trauma itself, is
messy, confusing, intense and overwhelming. Persons often jump around, surviving
the best they can. Some may even move to the outer circle only to find
themselves back in the inner circle again having a desire for
revenge.
- The key is knowing that choice is available. Amela
Puljek-Shank, currently a graduate student in Eastern Mennonite University's
Conflict Transformation Program, recalls the helpfulness of this trauma healing
map. As a survivor of the Bosnian War, Amela shared how the trauma healing map
assisted her by providing a visual representation of the trauma itself. At that
time her trauma experience was a confusing and overwhelming emotional experience
which included flashbacks and a pervasive fear of remembering the atrocities of
war. Finally she was able to get a visual representation of the inner emotional
experience as well as another path that might take her toward healing. "In the
war situation with the anger, hate and revenge, I could see how I could never
basically heal if I was staying in the inner circle of trauma anger and wanting
to do violence. From the diagram, I began to see that I had a choice to remain
in the inner circle of trauma or move to the outer circle of trauma healing: a
choice to heal rather than to hate and kill; a choice to possibly become a
healthy individual again; a choice to take some steps to move back home after
displacement---home to my spirit, my body, my homeland."
Amela is clear that people who want to do the work of peacebuilding and
conflict transformation where trauma has occurred, need to receive training in
trauma healing and recovery. She thinks trauma should be a core course in any
peacebuilding curriculum. "You can make peace on the governmental level and
think that our work is over but when 2 million people are displaced and
traumatized? How can you make peace when trauma healing does not take place? How
can we heal conflicts if we don't have any idea how to heal traumas? To create
real peace, there needs to be recognition of the trauma and time for trauma
healing to take place--at the national level as well as individual
level."
Fork in the Road Decision:
Choosing to Move from Inner Circle to Outer Circle
Why let go and move to the outer
circle? Why forgive or even think about it? The pain, violation or injustice is
so great that the main impulse--which can stay for months and years--is to get
even. The survivor needs to find some answers to the question as to why move on.
Sometimes we need to go round and round the inner circle until we are certain
that we have to--and gradually choose to--take another kind of healing path. We
find out that nothing new or good under the sun is in the inner circle of anger,
revenge and hatred and actually discover that we have become like the enemy. The
bitterness is destructive for the self as well as the other. The outer circle is
so unnatural that we have to be sure that some of the reactions that come so
humanly, so instinctively are not any good for us or our communities.
The Paradox of Trauma Healing: In
Order to Forget, We Need to Remember
As peacebuilders, we are
beginning to ask the questions of what to do in the aftermath of trauma. How do
we remember and tell the trauma story so as not to re-traumatize? In her book
Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow describes a two-year
study where these questions were asked. Minow, with an organization called,
Facing History and Ourselves, explored the range of possible institutional
responses to collective violence, genocide, apartheid and war.
After these atrocities,
"What lessons can be learned--what should be taught--to young people growing up
in a world that has known, and still produces incomprehensible patterns of
violence and torture? Would it be better to shield young people from the fact of
those patterns until they grow up? The wager made by programs like Facing
History and Ourselves is that young people would do better to learn about the
horrors that have occurred at the hands of adults than to be subject to silence
about the events that still shape their world. Young people, understandably,
want to know what has been done, and what can be done, to respond, redress, and
prevent future occurrences".
We know that forgive and
forget does not work and, in fact, layers on more trauma. The question continues
to beg for a creative healing and restoring response to trauma: how to remember
and move on so that the trauma story is healed and the conflict transformed. As
peacebuilders, our mission is to hear the trauma story, revise it and receive a
fuller picture of the truth(s) of the trauma and begin to hold it differently so
as to live into another story for our future.
Nancy Good
Sider
Assistant Professor of Conflict Studies
Email:
Posted and distributed by
Conflict Transformation Program with permission.
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