Date: 9/25/2023
Email: meb10135@nyu.edu
As I engage with this week’s readings, I am noticing the inescapable interconnectivity that we are enmeshed in as humans. The social fabric, with its complex intricacies of power relations, is the given space within which we live, love, fight, bury the dead, and die. Our existence is actualized through our relationships. We exist in-relationship. A traumatic experience is an occurrence that makes an unexpected appearance and shakes up not just the relationship within which this experience occurs, but all the relationships that the traumatized body is involved in. The question is: how can one live after experiencing something so devastating that life has become split into a before and after? An aftertime which doesn’t run on the same clock as before, because terror never seems to fully cease?
Herman reminds us that traumatic events (and perhaps all human experiences) are never just personal, or just political. Trauma is a result of many complex factors: the inevitable dangers lurking around us just because of our aliveness, the effects of structural injustices and centuries-long forms of oppression, and our troubled relationships to the environments and bodies we relate to.
Van der Kolk teaches us about the various ways in which the body keeps the score. The body, designed to assure survival, has developed advanced modes of operation that ensure our survival. Fight, freeze, flight, or fawn – these strategies have proved themselves throughout evolution to be the most effective ones, and we continue to use them when faced with a critical situation. Interestingly, van der Kolk explains to us how the body acts before the mind can comprehend the scope of the situation, when the amygdala fires signals to the prefrontal cortex. I am reminded about the time when having to deal with a very dangerous situation, I found myself instinctively resourceful, unreasonably calm, and capable of protecting not just myself, but the people I care about. I felt deep astonishment at the discovery of my body’s capacity to do whatever it takes to ensure survival.
Van der Kolk tells us that having experienced traumatic events, the body may get stuck in survival responses such as fight or flight, and mistake the surroundings as dangerous when it is reminded of the traumatic event by presence of triggers. The work of healing then involves relearning one’s relationship with the surrounding environment and others, and rediscovering healthy parameters for feeling alarmed at a dangerous situation.
In another part of the book, van der Kolk mentions that people who are traumatized as children are far more likely to find themselves in abusive relationships or other traumatic experiences in their adulthood than people who didn’t have traumatic experiences in childhood. Therefore, people with experiences of poverty and on the receiving end of discrimination and other forms of injustice are much more likely to continue struggling as they move through their life than people who were born into more privileged lives. I believe this is exemplified in the work of Herman, who places trauma not only as a private event, but a profoundly social form of relationality, which has a history, ingrained forms of injustice, and patterns of abuse of power.
I am astonished by the artwork by Carlos Martiel called “Bloodline”. The work speaks directly to my visceral self and reminds me of my somatic encounters with various landscapes across the oceans and continents. I am reminded, once again, of the profound interconnectivity that we are blessed to be a part of: walking on the Earth and bleeding with it. I am reminded of the intertwined relationship of social justice and climate justice, necessitated by the incomprehensible damage that settler colonial capitalism has done to our planet and its people. As I look at the artwork, I am also reminded of the raw beauty of being alive in our embodied form, the pain that comes with it, and a memory of surprise at discovering how sweet my blood tastes having cut my skin as a child.