Philosophical Reflections on Mothering in Trauma

Melissa Burchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351578455
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Philosophical Reflections on Mothering in Trauma examines the lived experience of mothering children who have been seriously harmed by others. Using an interdisciplinary approach, that employs a feminist phenomenology and an emphasis on narrative theory, this ground-breaking work gives voice to experiences of trauma, and of mothering, not ordinarily heard in philosophical discourses.

With a philosophical lens, Melissa Burchard examines the challenges faced by families during the adoption and parenting of abused children. In doing so, Burchard argues that the investigation of traumatic experience poses questions that philosophers must address if we are to improve collective understanding of the human condition. These questions centre around the epistemological implications of traumatic experience, the role of power and privilege in abusive relationships, and the interconnected issues of morality and moral agency in trauma, problematic desires engendered in traumatic circumstances, and therapeutic responses to trauma. The book expresses ways in which mothering wounded children can, if we are deeply engaged and reflective, shift our understandings of what it means to be parents, to be children, to love, to know, to construct a self, to feel desire, to nurture, to coerce, and to live in the ambiguity of not knowing which decisions are right and which are wrong.

Part I

Epistemologies of disorder and trauma

1 The intelligibility of disorder

Epistemological issues loom large in my reflections on loving wounded children, because attempting to help them and respond adequately to their needs often depends on grasping their thinking, their knowing, and their understanding of themselves and the world, which my partner and I share with them but do not perceive in the same ways.

Of course, there are many ways that the thinking of trauma survivors can be affected. Sometimes it seems that the most appropriate metaphors for their knowing are those that suggest disorder, as thinking that has been disrupted by trauma can be confused and confusing, messy, muddled. On the other hand, though, it can also be extraordinarily insightful, perceptive and intuitive, as these characteristics may become part of the survival tools of the abused. Then too, some survivors’ thinking will exhibit cunning and a highly developed capacity for manipulation when the general survival strategy is based on controlling others to the best of their ability. Like the thinking of children whose lives have followed a more usual course, the thinking of traumatized children will change as they go through developmental stages, although their development may be somewhat different (often slower, for example, or it may be that certain cognitive abilities are damaged/changed due to disruptions in brain–center relationships) than their non-traumatized peers.

In discussing ways that thinking and knowing are disrupted or malformed by trauma, I am assuming a picture of “standard epistemology” against which those disruptions can be compared. A picture of “Standard Analytic Epistemology” (SAE) has recently been articulated by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout in an article and book on the subject (Bishop and Trout 2005a, 2005b). The authors summarize this standard epistemology as “a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism (Chisholm 1981, Pollock 1974), coherentism (Bonjour 1985, Lehrer 1974), reliabilism (Dretske 1981, Goldman 1986) and contextualism (DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996)” (Bishop and Trout, 2005b, 696). In general, the questions in these epistemologies are whether our beliefs are actually true, whether they can be justified and if so how, and/or whether they can be counted as knowledge rather than mere belief. Foundationalism says that beliefs are justified as true or as knowledge on the basis of other already justified beliefs. Coherentism justifies beliefs on the basis of their “fit” with other beliefs; for example, on the basis of their logical consistency. Reliabilism requires that beliefs or knowledge be formed through a process that can be shown to reliably produce true beliefs/knowledge. Contextualism says that the context for our beliefs sets the standard for whether they can be considered true/knowledge. Another standard epistemology is one that deals with the question of what truth itself is and how we can know we have it or are justified in claiming it. Alvin Goldman claims that the most popular approach among these is correspondence theory, in which a proposition or belief, etc., is true just in case there actually is a fact or state of affairs in the world which corresponds to it (Goldman 1999, 42).

Although Goldman explicitly positions his epistemology within the social realm, standard epistemologies generally do not (which is not to say they could not) emphasize the social and relational or the embodied aspects of knowing to the extent or in the ways that many feminist and non-white theorists tend to. Considering the activities of knowing from the perspective of trauma, especially traumatized children, shows how embodiment and the social are fundamental for knowledge-making and knowledge claims. This perspective helps make visible ways in which standard epistemologies leave gaps in our knowing activities, by assuming, for example, that all knowing proceeds in the same ways, that all knowers are essentially the same, and that consequently what is known by someone is the same as what must be acknowledged to be known, or at least be capable of being known, by all the others. As Lorraine Code says in explaining standard, dominant epistemologies, “if one cannot transcend subjectivity and the particularities of its ‘locations,’ then there is no knowledge worth analyzing” (Code 1995, 25). Code, who calls these “S-knows-that-p” epistemologies, explains them in terms of connections to Enlightenment legacies and “later infusion with positivist-empiricist principles” such that they “have defined themselves around ideals of pure objectivity and value-neutrality” (24).

It seems to me that looking at knowing in or through trauma shows the necessity of recognizing what Code and others have called the situatedness of knowers, and taking seriously what effects being situated has or can have on knowing. This does not imply that the standard epistemologies are simply and always mistaken, but rather that they describe some ways of knowing rather than all ways, or the knowing of some people some of the time rather than all people all of the time. The idea of a situated knowing emphasizes the “nature and situation – the location – of S” rather than simply paying attention to the content of p (Code 1995, 29), and thus allows us to recognize the importance of the subject of knowing in the production of knowledge. Because the subject of trauma may be seeing and experiencing the world in very different ways than “typical” subjects do, what they know may also be very different, as it is strongly inflected by that traumatic experience.

The illogic of trauma’s logic

Standard logic has never been my strong suit, but in working with abused children I have become quite good at following illogic. This doesn’t mean simply “reversing” the rules of deduction. It is a matter of, as Andrea Nye (1990) says, learning to “read” what is being presented through words, eyes, body, and in this case, need. Children who have suffered abuse need to tell someone about it because they need help in understanding it and support in dealing with its effects, but most often they are not able to do this directly. A number of reasons may prompt this: they may, for example, be too young to even articulate it. Peg O’Connor talks about this in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion that the limits of one’s language create the limits of one’s world: if my language is literally inadequate to the task, I will be unable to make sense of my experience (O’Connor 2002, 82). In other cases, children may have been too effectively threatened (“I’ll kill you – or your mom, or your sister, or your dog – if you tell” is not an uncommon threat) and thus too afraid to tell. Or they may re-experience too much of the events when they even think about them to be able to verbalize them.

They may also believe that if they tell you what awful things “they did” you will be disgusted and reject them. Psychologist Erich Fromm (1973) says that the strongest motivator of human action is probably fear. The terror of being abused is often compounded by this fear of being “found out”, of being revealed as the bad kids they believe they must be. So the line of thinking may go like this: “Everybody knows that good things happen to good kids – when you are good, you get good consequences/rewards. And bad things happen to bad kids. What happened to me is bad – I know that because I feel bad, and because I’m not supposed to tell anyone about it. So since bad things happen to bad kids, then I am a bad kid. And anyway, they told me I’m bad: they said that I made them do the bad things to me by being bad.”

In working with abused kids, then, one may find this scenario: a child who has been abused may feel desperate to tell about it in order to get comfort, be reassured, find relief, find safety. You, working with them, are encouraging them to tell, saying it will be safe and you will not reject them and that it was not their fault. But what they know is, the truth is in actions, not in words. Perhaps the grown-ups who hurt them also loved them, also said they would protect them. Or those grown-ups told them they were bad, and that’s why they had to be hurt, and they made those words go with the actions. That is, they made the words concrete and real through their actions toward the child, on the child’s body. What is most real, most true, most knowable, is what is lived; that is what a child can know. Thus an epistemology of abuse/trauma is deeply embodied.

Consequently, although you are telling them they are or will be safe with you, they cannot experience that safety because it has not been raised to the level of reality, of truth, by being enacted on/for them. It is only words. And the difficulty is that the reality they have lived is so real and so dangerous that they cannot, no matter how much they want to, simply let go of it and believe what you say. They cannot trust the reality of your words until those words have become real enough to dislodge and replace the reality that was created through the abuse. How long does this take? Well, as the comedian says, “How long have you got?”

The cognitive development of children who have been subjected to brutal and prolonged abuse is deeply affected by their experiences of loss, betrayal, fear and confusion. They experience developmental “roadblocks … in reaction to developmental and shock trauma and the related nervous system dysregulation, disruptions in attachment, and distortions of identity” (Heller and LaPierre, 2012, 1). There is now a rich literature on the ways that abuse and trauma affect the development and size of different centers in the brain and the abilities of those centers to communicate, hence changing the ways that the brain behaves and thus how thinking (and behavior) works (Weiss 2007; Tiecher et al. 2002; Shin et al. 2006). Contemporary philosophers also are much more engaged with cognitive and neuroscience; Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (1999) have made an extended argument calling for philosophy to change its picture of the mind and thinking based on findings in the sciences. Although they are not arguing from the perspective of trauma, they see that our philosophy must shift to a deeply embodied model, which will “require our culture to abandon some of its deepest philosophical assumptions” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 3). We will need to completely revise our picture of ourselves as humans, causing a “shift in our understanding of reason … of vast proportions” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 5).

Lakoff and Johnson’s explication of the embodied mind helps to see why it is the case that trauma would have such an impact on a person’s thinking. Mind and body are not separate entities; rather, “the word mental picks out those bodily capacities and performances that constitute our awareness and determine our creative and constructive responses to the situations we encounter. Mind isn’t some mysterious abstract entity that we bring to bear on our experience. Rather, mind is part of the very structure and fabric of our interactions with our world” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 266, emphasis in original). This being so, if we have abusive and traumatic interactions with our world, especially at a formative age, it stands to reason that our mental-bodily capacities and performances will reflect those experiences.

Thus abused and traumatized children tend to have an epistemological framework that is different from the “ordinary”, and also different from what traditional or standard philosophies say about how we know. Their world slips from one reality to another: the reality in which no one knows about what happens to them, and the reality in which it happens, but must be kept secret. The rules for survival are different in each, and they have to learn to watch carefully for any indicators there might be that they are about to be flung into the hell dimension of another abusive episode. What they know is that they live under constant threat, that they cannot be sure that anything or anyone is truly “safe”, that the world they left to go to school in the morning may not be the same one that they return to. Under this framework, which continues even if/when abuse ends and they are in a situation of safety, it makes sense to say that whatever they experience is real, that what they feel is in fact what is true, and there is no other basis for truth, not logic, not verification, not correspondence, not social objectivity. Under this embodied epistemology of abuse, nothing but what you feel/experience yourself can be true, or real, or trusted. But even this cannot be ultimately relied on, because of abusers’ tendencies to undermine the knowing of the abused by insisting that they are wrong, crazy, spiteful or otherwise not to be believed. So what can become of the claim to know when the only foundation for knowledge is riddled with uncertainty to start with, and then is deliberately submarined?

The mental processes of abused children thus resemble something like a cross between a labyrinth (complete with monster) and a mine field. Their reasoning practices are built on the experience of living in two worlds at least. One is what we would call the “ordinary” world, which they must learn to negotiate to at least some extent, but which is not the primary focus of their concern. The other is the world of double-speak, false appearances, constant threat, unpredictable violence and/or a love that both sustains and destroys at the same time. In that world, which is more actual to them than the other, the real is unspeakable. What this child must learn, then, is to never speak the real. What this child will speak is the not-real, or the skirting-the-real, or the partly real which manages to both hide and convey truth. To understand what this child says and means requires learning to see what is behind or underneath, what is hidden in their words.

Ignorance isn’t bliss, but it hurts a lot less

A colleague once suggested a working definition of knowledge-making: we make knowledge through a combination of life experience, plus data/information, plus theory or framework, plus interaction/discussion, plus critical thinking.¹ This seems to me a good working definition for the educated and reflective, for the scholar and for her students. But children’s cognitive abilities are not so far along, and consequently they seem to function with a different knowledge-making process. It’s something more like this: what you know is literally what affects you. Contrary to (traditional western) philosophy, knowledge is not abstract or objective, nor is it a logos – a “what is spoken”. For children, what happens to you is what you know. All parents see this: one can say “That’s hot and will hurt you” a million times and it will not be known by a child. This is because children must literally make knowledge through their bodies, through their physical experience. Correlatively, what children experience becomes what they know. When we have not shared that experience with them, but instead expect them to know our own experience, we are adding greatly to their burdens. When we refuse what they know, and this is often done by well-meaning people who simply do not want to know the bad, we reinforce their pain and contribute to their confusion and disorientation.

That what we experience is what we know is true of all of us to some extent. But as we grow older and develop cognitive and emotional abilities that enable us to weigh our experience in light of more general information about the world, and to think more abstractly and metaphorically, we become better able to use the intellectual process of knowledge-making suggested above. If we forget that this is a matter of development and is not available to the majority of young children, we confuse them and do them a disservice – something that they will later have to struggle with and un-learn. If we forget this about children who have been traumatized, or if we simply deny their experience, we leave them screaming in the night or shivering in corners as they attempt to deal with what they know, while all around them people tell them that what they know, in their flesh and bones, is not real. When we tell them that nothing will hurt them, we leave them with the cheery and well-intentioned assurance that they do not, and cannot, know what they know.

Abusers of children are most often persons known by and/or charged with responsibility for the care, nurture and safety of the child. The trauma of the abuse then carries the additional burden of betrayal, which carries a significant added impact (Freyd 2002). Betrayal can “enter” the experience in other ways, too, as when a parent refuses to believe that their child has been abused, and does not prevent it or aid them in coping with it. It is, for example, a truism in work with abused children that a child will feel more anger toward a non-abusing parent than toward the abusing one, because that parent should have known and protected them, but didn’t.

Abuse leads to secrets: children are required to keep their knowledge secret from others. This adds another very complex epistemological and emotional/experiential layer to the effects of abuse: abused children are burdened with the task of making a world that is as coherent and knowable as possible while not allowing themselves (for survival/sanity) or others (for the protection/love of their abusers) to know what that world is. They have to both know what is real, and yet make unreal for themselves and others the pieces of it which would reveal that they know things they are not supposed to know. But this is not the only problem or danger for their knowing, for secrets themselves have their dangers. Sissela Bok (1989), in her study of secrets, is concerned with how they work in ordinary interactions. But what she says indicates how much of a burden on children being required to keep secrets, both their own and their abusers’, can be. She tells us that “secrecy can harm those wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: adopting trauma
• Introduction
• PART I: Epistemologies of disorder and trauma
• PART II: Moral matters
• PART III: Traumatic disfigurements
• PART IV: Adventures in becoming: theorizing identity in trauma
• Index