In explaining the functioning of trauma at the organic level, Bessel Van der Kolk also addresses two ways of treating it: from the top to the bottom of the brain, whose objective is to regulate the physiological reactions to trauma through a conscious exercise; and from the bottom to the top, whose approach aims at working directly with the bodily reactions so that they develop new connections to stimuli that previously altered them and thus, in calm, can give way to the other work with the patient, that of making sense of his or her traumatic experience. Rather than classifying patients according to their dissociative reaction or physically reliving the disturbance and panic, I am interested in the methods of treating it. Van der Kolk, in tune with Judith Herman, also mentions that any trauma implies a certain degree of isolation of the individual, and that, in the face of this, creative work that seeks to reestablish the capacity to relate to others can be much more effective; she mentions that self-defense groups for women who have been sexually violated or yoga or even theater groups can be effective tools to modulate through the body the experience that retains the individual in a catastrophic moment of his or her life. He says: “The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.”(108)

Van der Kolk also mentions how schools should follow the same principle of treating the members of their communities through play, creativity and empathy, instead of following a rigid and traditional model where knowledge (in the abstract) is privileged over the learning that takes place in coexistence. Above all, it seems to me of utmost importance, considering that these are centers where many times children who have been violated and whose “behavioral problems” are largely due to physical and psychological mistreatment they suffer outside (and inside) the classroom attend. Although she mentions it briefly, I find this observation coherent with her postulates, especially if one takes into account the political stance that Judith Herman incites:

Early investigators often felt strong personal bonds and political solidarity with trauma survivors, regarding them less as objects of dispassionate curiosity than as collaborators in a shared cause. This kind of closeness and mutuality may be difficult to sustain in a scientific culture where unbiased observation is often thought to require a distant and impersonal stance. Yet without it, the ability of authentic understanding is inevitably lost. (173)

While Herman points out how the scientific perspective must remain, as it offers keys to understanding the functioning and amelioration of trauma – as in the case of Van der Kolk – he does not lose sight of the fact that the work must respond to humanism rather than mere scientific curiosity. Trauma can be experienced alone, but it must be treated communally and in communion, and this must be a political stance. As mentioned by the same author, trauma tends to appear more in people who have historically been more vulnerable and vulnerable, children, women and feminized, racialized, queer, and physically and mentally disabled people are those who have most often suffered abuse from other people while they have been in a greater state of vulnerability to other socio-political and even natural situations (which areas of a city are most affected by the weather, for example, areas built for middle and upper class people to live in, or marginalized places). Even when he mentions the contrast between public and private violence (43) with the case of soldiers who have war traumas, he considers them, and I read it, as subjects who have changed their status from privileged males in a familiar environment to cannon fodder in war conflicts, he mentions numerous cases of soldiers who, from doublethink, advocate for the human dignity of men sent to the battlefield over the interests of rulers from poetry or simply from their accounts in therapy. The shell-shock syndrome has also occurred because of the ease with which they were abandoned by their own troops rather than because of the pain suffered in their bodies. As the author herself mentions, her book is about the search for and construction of the common in cases of trauma (1), thus she goes so far as to say that:

In many countries that have recently emerged from dictatorship or civil war, it has become apparent that putting an immediate stop to the violence and attending to basic survival needs of the affected populations are necessary but not sufficient conditions for social healing. In the aftermath of systematic political violence, entire communities can display symptoms of PTSD, trapped in alternating cycles of numbing and intrusion, silence and reenactment. (174)

In my personal experience, I felt that having spent a lifetime in a city known worldwide for its violence had not had the impact on me that outsiders might believe. While I am aware that painful things have happened that have marked me in a definitive way in recent years, it was not until February of this year that I learned through a diagnosis that I myself have post-traumatic stress syndrome; the symptoms that affected me then and still affect my life I had learned to see them as something normal within me. But what impresses me is that all those situations that have marked me and after which I was privileged to get a diagnosis, I did not live them alone: numerous attacks on life have been witnessed by me and my friends, my parents and sisters for almost two decades at unexpected moments. I remember, for example, going by car with my dad to an event where my mom was being recognized for her work as a public servant, and leaving our house, on the main street a car was stranded in the middle of the road because in a matter of seconds a van passed by with machine guns and shot at them, my dad and I, after, like the rest of the cars, maneuvering to get out of there, decided to continue with what we were doing and go where we had to go as if it had not happened. Situations like this have happened to me over and over again, and when something more or less similar happened to me while I was in New York, my reaction was the same, to run away and then continue with my life.

The trauma of an entire community and the ways we deal with it is something that amazes me. If I think we have been able to survive as a city, I think as a community we are highly fragmented, and it also shows in how we treat people who come from outside. In 2018, one of the first strong waves of migrants coming from Central America to Juarez raised a series of reactions from people who gloat about being part of a city made up of people from all over, a city that is also benevolent and kind to newcomers. Opinions of fear and suspicion towards these people were not long in coming, could it be that people were also responding to other traumas, and if so, how to deal with them? If Van der Kolk speaks of theater as a tool, why not think of art in general terms for this purpose, to denounce and, maybe just maybe, atone for some of those adverse reactions to establishing bonds with other humans? “Monumento I”, “Monumento II”, “Monumento III”, and “Mar sin orillas” by Carlos Martiel surprised me because they answer these same questions, questions of what to do with violent environments, what to do so that people who have been violated again and again have some visibility. In a bottom-up therapy (Van der Kolk), Martiel’s practice stirs my guts and quickens my pulse, perhaps because to a certain extent it makes me relive some scenes, however, with the distance of artistic practice, it allows me to overcome those reactions and re-signify them from a position of political commitment. Now, I am left with the question of how to know what effect it has on the other spectators, can we heal by performing and narrating ourselves in this way?, is it important to know?

 

gm3133@nyu.edu