Trauma

During the study, I shifted from speaking about “violence” to using the term “trauma.” When I spoke of violence I was continually asked what particular form of violence I was talking about. I preferred the term trauma, as the emphasis of the term is on the reaction of the person, and draws the focus away from the degree or amount of violence experienced. Judith Herman provides a clear definition of trauma:

Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning. Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life... They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror and evoke the responses of catastrophe. (Herman, 199 p.33)

However, this therapeutic term created its own problems by taking attention away from the agent that causes the trauma. The therapeutic literature draws attention to the impact of trauma, which leads a person to experience subsequent violence as also traumatic.

They have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger. They also have an extreme startle response to unexpected stimuli, as well as an intense reaction to specific stimuli associated with the traumatic event. (Herman, p. 36)

This awareness seems valuable to help workers realize that loud and aggressive talk in the classroom, for example, might evoke extreme terror in some learners, or to notice that many learners, as they told me, experience government pressure to get into the workforce as controlling and terrifying. Learners described how it brought back earlier experiences of being abusively controlled. However, therapeutic literature suggests that this sensitivity is abnormal in comparison with some assumed “normal” level of arousal. Events which provoke a reaction are described as “minor stimuli” (van der Kolk et al. p.3). The perspective on how major the stimuli “really” are, is that of someone who has not experienced trauma. The survivor would not describe the stimuli as “minor.” I think it is crucial to be able to recognize therapeutic descriptions of the impact of trauma to understand major reactions to levels of violence (that some might see as minor), AND also to question the implication that “healing” from trauma is a process of no longer reacting “unreasonably,” and of moving from abnormal to normal.