Embodied Trauma and Healing

Critical Conversations on the Concept of Health

Anna Westin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367406134
• eBook ISBN: 9781000544787
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine
• Index: Psychology

What if philosophy could solve the psychological puzzle of trauma? Embodied Trauma and Healing argues just that, suggesting that one might be needed in order to understand the other. The book demonstrates how the body-mind problem that haunted Descartes was addressed by phenomenologists, whilst also proposing that the human experience is lived subjectively as embodied consciousness.

Throughout this book, the author suggests that the phenomenological tools that are used to explore the body can also be an effective way to discuss the physical and mental aspects of embodied trauma. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas, the book outlines a phenomenological approach to the embodied and relational subject. It offers a reading of embodied trauma that can connect it to wider conversations in psychological underpinnings of trauma through Peter Levine's somatic research and Bessel van der Kolk's embodied remembering. Connecting to the analytic tradition, the book suggests that phenomenology can unify both language-based and body-based therapeutic practice. It also presents a compelling discussion that ties the embodied experience of relation in trauma to the wider causal factors of social suffering and relational rupture, intergenerational trauma and the trauma of land, as informed by phenomenology.

Embodied Trauma and Healing is essential reading for researchers within the fields of philosophy, psychology and medical humanities for it actively engages with contemporary configurations of trauma theory and recent research developments in healing and mental disorder diagnosis.

Part ICritical Discourses on Embodied Trauma

DOI: 10.4324/9780367800017-1

1Trauma and the Subject

DOI: 10.4324/9780367800017-2

In the middle of the last century, Simone Weil wrote her philosophical reflections on the experience of upheaval in the world around her. She penned that ‘[t]‌o be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is [also] one of the hardest to define’ (1952, p. 43). From my observations and conversations that have formed this book, I have seen how trauma and uprootedness go hand in hand. The need for roots that Weil laments as the basic human requirement of her time has resulted in the traumatised history that we live out today. But Weil also notes how hard it is to define what it means to be rooted and uprooted. This book argues that the difficulty in defining traumatic experience points to the wider damage of a human experience of rupture, displacement, loss and silence.

At its core, discussions about trauma are conversations about health. Trauma is explored, not in order to glorify the shocking details of an event, but rather these dominating experiences of memory can be understood and integrated into the wider experience of a person’s life. In this book, we look at contributions to health discourse from various disciplines, through the lens of phenomenology. By this, we mean, what health means as an experience of consciousness, oriented towards particular phenomena. In this case, the relationship of consciousness to the world around us means examining health through subjectivity; that is, through our perceptions and responses, our self-narratives and relationships to the world around us. In studying the different definitions of trauma and the experiences of traumatised people, we are confronted with the complexity of health. Trauma maintains that ambiguous experience because of its interconnection to so many different phenomena. To really understand what is going on, to enter into Weil’s claim that ‘uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed’, we need to get under the assumptions and theories that we have already claimed about our relationship to the world. Trauma requires an almost ‘naïve’ return to basics: understanding human subjectivity and our relationships with the world around us.

Since the beginning of human history, there have been countless documentations of trauma. But it is not until more recently that it was critically explored, as a situation that deviated from the experience of full health. When developing his initial theory, Sigmund Freud defined trauma as an excitation so powerful that it ‘breaks through the protective shield’ of consciousness, meaning that a person’s mental experience is flooded and bound ‘with large amounts of stimulus’ (ct. in Bulut 2019, p. 1). He later wrote that trauma is an ‘experience of helplessness’ (Perelberg 2015, p. 1453). Judith Herman, on the other hand, defines trauma by pointing to the terror of the event that causes it. For her, trauma is a paradox: an alternating experience ‘between feeling numb and reliving the event’ (1992, p. 1). The diversity of definitions continues. The different accounts reveal a complex relationship between rupture, suffering and memory, somewhat ambiguously interconnected and understood.

In this book, I want to explore how we have historically tried to understand trauma. What we see quite quickly is that there are many kinds of traumas. There are childhood traumas, where wounding takes place early on to rupture a child’s perception of relationship to a trustworthy world. Episodic traumas, such as an experience of a car crash, are contrasted with complex ongoing traumas, and historical trauma that involves the displacement of communities over multiple generations. The sheer diversity of experiences can make it hard to find points of cohesion. For instance, how do you compare the experiences of First Nations communities in Canada, with the suffering of Palestinians, or how can memories of a concentration camp be interpreted alongside the experience of a child who has been molested by her parent? Or, how does a trafficked child’s story intersect with an incarcerated person’s experience of generational abuse and neglect? The list of questions goes on. It requires acknowledging the ambiguity, but also a search for points of intersection.

The first part of this book will look at how different theorists have tried to define just what this experience of trauma is. This means mapping out how the concept of trauma has evolved, conceptually and scientifically. Trauma, as a lived human experience, requires understanding how we, as humans, are affected, and then how we live out that affect. This means that we need to know something about the body. But it also requires looking at the different ways in which we try to share our bodied histories or hide them away. It asks us to listen to the soul and to explore consciousness and emotion. It presses us to understand the role of ritual and practice, of place and our interconnection with others. As we will see, each theory of trauma gives its own interpretation of what it means to be a human being in relationship with the world around us.

But for us to understand what it means to live trauma, and what it requires of us, we need to look at how specific experiences of suffering are lived. It requires defining the interdisciplinary discourse on health and trauma as a living dynamic experience of rupture and replacement between the psyche, the body and the relational self. Because trauma is a description of a specific kind of human experience, it is important to understand how different theories explain this experience. In Chapter 1, we will look at psychological accounts of trauma. Chapter 2 will assess body-based theories that start by reading the physical experience of the body and its response systems for signs. Chapter 3 will then engage with the tricky task of diagnosing and reading trauma through alternate modalities. Chapter 4 will end with an analysis of the limits of these models, suggesting that the story of trauma needs re-situating in a wider story of human relationship.

Amira’s Story

The first time I met Amira was at a café in central London. I was working in a back corner, typing through a final draft of my PhD and she was having lunch with a friend. That was a few years ago. When I told her that I was writing a book on trauma, I felt somehow that I wanted her story to be included in it. I knew something of her context, coming to the United Kingdom as a political refugee from Palestine. I also felt like the research I was doing was taking me into an experience that needed me to connect it to someone I knew and trusted. As I sat down to hear her story, it opened my eyes to just how unique each experience is.

Amira was born during the First Intifada and the Gulf War. She shared with me her mixture of memories accumulated from growing up during that time. At age three, she remembers hiding out with nine other people in her little room. It was the safest room in the house, and all of the windows had been taped over. Amira remembers these early emotional cues vividly. Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minto and Clare Pain write that in traumatic situations, our emotions colour our thought processes, in order for us to direct our attention to specific cues (2006, p. 11). For Amira, she remembers feeling a constant fear of death, and realising early on that she was helpless to do anything about the violence that enveloped her neighbourhood.

Amira recalls the rhythmic sound of conflict and remembers once how her grandad untaped the window in the house to show her the fighter jets flying close outside. During the five years of the second Intifada, clashes flared up constantly until they built the West Bank wall around her house. During the first three months, the family went into hiding. But once they realised that the conflict was not going to stop, they tried to get about their business again. Amira remembers the fear, often of being shot or of seeing someone she loved shot. She lost a friend and a family member in the violence. She got used to seeing people dead and manoeuvring around the city to avoid the clashes and bullets. She felt it was a miracle that they didn’t get hit.

For Amira and her family, this time meant living on high alert, in what she described as ‘fight or flight mode’. Current research tells us that the fight or flight mode means that the body has shifted into instinctive hyperarousal response to a situation that continues to be dangerous, and from which a person cannot escape (Ogden et al. 2011, p. 33). Amira said that what compounded the challenges were that the culture around her was not forgiving either. The rest of Bethlehem had avoided some of the intense clashes that had surrounded the area of Rachel’s tomb where her family lived. In the 40-day siege, they ran out of food. Her siblings were younger, and she felt a need to protect them, but she also realised that she was physically unable to do this by herself.

Amira remembered driving to school once with her dad and some other children. They saw a mysterious white truck and thought it would be fun to follow it. It reached the mall, and then the truck stopped. Men jumped out and started shooting at the air as people scurried in all directions. Her dad continued driving and the children all fell into hysterical laugher at the back of the car. They had been so scared that laughter had welled up inside them as a shock response.

Often, Amira would be evacuated in the middle of the night or spend days at home surrounded by machine-gun points. There was a military camp five minutes from the house and bullets were always firing. In the day, it was rubber bullets and gas bombs, and at night, there were always clashes. I asked Amira what she felt about the word trauma when she remembered her past.

She said that after being educated about what trauma was, that the term meant a lot to her. She took the term seriously because she could connect it to what had happened to her. She realised that whatever people have experienced leaves an impact that they need to work through. Of course, there are different kinds of traumas, she readily admitted, and different scales of traumatic intensity. She said she initially realised that trauma was related to war and refugees, death and attacks, to intense world events or intense events related to war. But she recognised later, when she heard about other people’s experiences, that trauma can also be experienced by people who have been sex trafficked or in car accidents. Differing from other experiences of suffering, Amira thought that trauma was attached to multiple layers of experience, at a higher intensity.

Amira tied trauma to an existential questioning. She said that part of what makes trauma different from other experiences of suffering is that it can raise unanswerable questions and leaves people with unresolved feelings. In trauma, she realised that the more events and relationships involved in the experience, the more unresolved questions it would leave. There was that difficulty because you could not have resolution. You are left asking, what was the point of all this?

Amira recognised that she always knew she and her family were paying a price for two groups of people, so it was not just a straightforward division between what was good and what was bad. There were multiple contributors, rather than one perpetrator. For her, it was more nuanced. She had to understand and reconcile herself to her own trauma, but then she wanted to move on. She said, ‘I find it hard to come to terms with being victim, unless it is that, yes, I have had trauma’. She said she felt there was a problem with taking the full identity of the victim and getting stuck there. Being a victim, as a complete identity, was different than unpacking the trauma. For her, the term victim can be all-consuming. She said:

what drives me to see the perspective as objectively as possible is that I don’t want to be labelled as a victim and I want to do something about it. Making a change would be rewarding and would be a part of healing my trauma, like initiating processes of preventing others from going through trauma – so healing is reciprocal. As I see people set free and protected, the more I am healed.

She said that, in going through these extreme experiences of conflict and rupture, she felt the need to engage in the opposite in order to heal. Advocating for other at-risk people groups has become a part of her journey of healing.

Amira referred to how events continued to influence her years after they had happened. Ogden et al. write that ‘[l]‌ong after the original traumatic events are over, many individuals find themselves compelled to anticipate, orient to, and react to stimuli that directly or indirectly resemble the original traumatic experience or its context’ (2011, p. 65). I asked Amira about her physical experience of trauma, and how it had felt for her. She said that the first time that she noticed it was in a destabilising move to London where her pillars of healing had been taken away (she was referring to her home, education, friends and family). It was then that she realised something was not right in her body. She felt pain, and it was as if her body was speaking to her. At that point, her head was mostly clear from having done psychotherapy. She said in that context that her emotions just needed space to be heard.

But when Amira realised that the pain was still present in her body, she went to get diagnosed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The trauma would appear as a physical symptom whenever she exercised or did intense activity, as a nerve flare-up on the left side of her body, in her face, sometimes it was in the lower neck, left arm and left leg, and most recently the right side too. Whenever she left London, it would almost disappear. At present, she does different things to heal, like yoga, and wants to explore more trauma healing methods ‘to re-wire my brain a bit’. But she says, science aside, her instinct is that finding a safe and nurturing presence and place, and prayer, are keys to her healing.

Reading this Book

Spending time with Amira’s story shed new light on my research on inter-relationality, or the relationships between experiences in trauma. I realised that trauma requires exploring how experience is impacted by the particularities of our suffering. This means that if we want to understand health, and how trauma can be healed, then we need to take time to unpack our definitions of what healing means, and how trauma affects the various interconnected parts of a person’s life. Understood in this way, healing integrates the experiences of a whole life, in order for a cohesive sense of self to orient towards a future after trauma. However, as trauma can dominate an individual’s sense of self, the experience needs to be understood, before it can be lived through. What I want to show here is that we need to have many different accounts, be it analytic, somatic, spiritual or political, to understand the ruptured relationships that constitute the trauma. Then we need to further these conversations, by exploring how our ideas of health can help us to heal trauma, or when our definitions of health require re-examination in order to hold what trauma shows us about being human.

These conversations will take place in four parts. The first part is entitled ‘Critical Discourses on Embodied Trauma’. This part of the book will give us a broad overview of the history of trauma studies, and how different interpretations of what it means to ‘be human’ affect how theorists perceive trauma. Drawing on physiological research, Part I will examine how trauma affects the body, as developed in the theories of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges’ on polyvagal theory. Here, a dynamic mapping of trauma emerges through the exchange of the nervous system, the fight-or-flight responses and the interconnectivity of brain function. Part I will then develop how the effects of trauma on the body are experienced through relationship. More specifically, this means looking at how trauma is experienced through the rupture of relations of trust, the violence of social relations, and how this rupture manifests itself individually in the psyche of the self. This part will therefore set the context for the rest of the book, as it situates the interdisciplinary discourse on health and trauma as a living dynamic and rupture between the psyche, the body and the relational self.

Once we have a general understanding of how trauma has been organised as a ‘kind’ of disordered experience, we will turn to philosophy. I use philosophy as a way of understanding the subjective experience of an individual life, in order to explore how each person can experience trauma differently, through to one’s interconnected experience of relationships. In Part II, ‘Phe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Preface
• Preface
• Part I Critical Discourses on Embodied Trauma
• Part II Phenomenology and the Traumatised Subject
• Part III Living Trauma in Relationship
• Part IV Living Trauma as Health
• Bibliography
• Index