17 February 2014

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A Witness To Trauma

“Can I get a witness?
Can I get a witness?”

– from the song, Some Kind of Wonderful

There are many possible reasons why people who have experienced some form of traumatic event in their lives go on to develop some form of post-traumatic stress (with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder being at the extreme end of the scale), whereas others do not. To get to the bottom of this, we can explore each person’s childhood and look at their family attachment style to see whether there were underlying fissures. We can also take our cues from psychophysiology, which gives us insights into how we process stressful situations in our brain (and reciprocally storing those experiences and feelings in the body). Naturally, we can also weigh the significance of the traumatic event in question (assuming it is known). It’s hard to say who will and who will not retain some kind of ill influence from whatever trauma they may have experienced.

In her book, Emotional Understanding, author Donna M. Orange makes an interesting observation–that sometimes the difference between those who develop PTS and those who do not sometimes comes down to whether there was someone around us at the time of the traumatic event to bear witness to our experience (either during or after the event). It could be a friend, a peer, a family member. Having someone witness our experience–to see and understand us in that moment– is a powerful and potentially restorative milestone. Likewise, the lack of someone to corroborate our experience allows our experience of trauma to become insulated–perhaps one role of a witness is to help us see that what happened to us happened outside of us as well as being felt internally.

Then there are false witnesses: we turn to, we approach someone who was there with us at the time and discover instead of empathy someone who doesn’t understand what happened–perhaps they don’t want to understand, or perhaps they don’t have the capability to understand in that moment. And this experience may heighten the trauma–after all, if someone can’t see what happened to us, then perhaps it’s all in our head? When a family member or a friend can’t see or understand our experience, the effect can be doubly isolating.

Sometimes a therapist ends up being that witness. Sometimes a therapist is the first person a client trusts enough to share their traumatic past experience. And while, in the case of an adult sharing childhood trauma, a therapist may not be as effective a witness due to the amount of time having passed, the client nonetheless can be served by sharing their pain outwardly with someone who can provide a sense of understanding, who represents an outward person who has witnessed the scars of the client’s past.

This can be a needed step forward.