recent criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic “bible” for psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and insurance companies, defines trauma as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence,” whether directly or indirectly. When I talk about it, I tend to expand this definition somewhat. Trauma is a site of shock in the body and/or psyche. It’s a rupture, a bifurcation, a disassembly. Trauma marks the moment when what was ended, and something new emerged.
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But what was the moment of trauma? Sometimes you can’t ever put your finger on it. There is no warp of scar that separates the Before from the After. Not in this body. There is only the fuzzy and ephemeral, unmappable distance of memory. The way I cannot mark when it started. The way I cannot tell you, It was here, when he rubbed my back over my summer tank top. Or, no, it was here, when his hands lifted the tank top a week or a month or who could say how long later? And why am I still looking for this line of demarcation, the moment when that brown-haired girl on the couch went from a regular tomboy with a handsy stepdad to someone not exactly there anymore at all. But that’s how it is with ghosting. Could you say when exactly the Cheshire Cat began to disappear? You simply saw his whole curved self, a ball of striped, grinning fur, tucked up into that tree, and only after he was well into his evaporation did you begin to notice what was missing—by the time that understanding took hold, he was all and only teeth. No obvious moment when you could point and say, Look, his edges have blurred. The blurring comes across gradually. You don’t know, when it begins, that some part of you will be blurred, ungraspable, forever. You think it’s just going to be for a minute—just until he takes his hands back to himself. Just until your mom says something to him. But then he doesn’t take his hands back, and your mom presses her lips together tight, and those edges that thought they were just pretending, just practicing the art of disappearance, shimmer more finely, get harder and harder to feel again; you can’t make yourself reappear whenever you want to anymore, like the Cheshire Cat could. You don’t know that one day you, too, will be only teeth—and that then those sharp knowings will disappear from your grasp, too. (2015)
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Many of the folks I’ve written with over the last decade are survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault or rape, extreme or ritual abuse. Others have survived or are living with cancer or other life-altering illness. Some have had to live with sexual harassment, neglect, emotional abuse, forced prostitution. Some will never have a name or a clear visual memory of their traumatic experience: instead what they have is a body telling them that something terrible happened. Often, these writers without specific memories reach hard for language that can put a name to physical sensations like nausea, nightmares, discomfort in certain situations, discomfort around certain people, depression, hyper-vigilance—that is, want to make sense of these symptoms of PTSD. Despite the DSM’s languaging of trauma as an experience that is “exceptional” or “out of the ordinary,” trauma is a common experience—it’s a rare person who has experienced nothing traumatic in their lives.
Trauma lives in us in individual ways; through trauma, our relationship with language is ruptured. What has happened to us makes no sense because we cannot find words, because there are no right words to make anyone else truly understand. Our storyline fissures, and we fragment. We experience ourselves as voiceless, sometimes for many years. Trauma shocks us out of alignment; we are removed from our own story, and we have to, each of us, find and even create the language to articulate what we’ve been through and what we’ve become. We are left having to rebuild our whole narrative. The story of ourselves is what gets broken. The story of ourselves is what we have to suture together again.
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In 1994, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old, you could find me most days holding up a table at a cafe on the edge of my college campus, filling unlined notebook pages with long stretches of writing. I was scared and I was angry and I felt broken open inside and most days I didn’t feel like I made any sense at all unless I was writing. On the page, I didn’t have to pretend to be “together”; all my brokenness and fragments, questions and desires jumbled together in one place. I was trying to figure out my relationship to words, as much as I was trying to get out of my body and onto the page everything my stepfather had done. In the process of writing, I both discovered and created the story of my life. I met my (new) story and (new) self on the pages of those blank notebooks.
My stepfather attempted to sever me from words. He worked to render words—up to and including the words yes and no—meaningless. Maybe that’s not exactly right. What he wanted was for words to mean only what he wanted them to mean, and as soon as I thought I understood what meaning he wanted me to make, using the words he’d defined, he changed the rules. It was like living inside an Orwellian Newspeak generator. From my stepfather I’d learned that words don’t have to do or mean what the dictionary says. I was required to say Yes to my stepfather every time he wanted access to my body, even when what lived inside my mouth and skin, and could not be spoken, was No. He dismissed the word No. I learned that No could have no meaning at all.
Having to say one thing while meaning another, over and over again, drives us more than a little crazy, forces us to question how we can possibly communicate. What do words actually do? What good is language if it can be so easily stripped from its moorings, its connection to the real and lived experiential world?
Twenty-four years and thousands of pages later, I still don’t fully trust that words will do what I ask them to.
An experience of trauma—either long-term or instantaneous—rocks us out of our familiar relationship with words, as it rocks us out of our familiar relationship with everything else in our lives. Part of what makes an experience traumatic is that we are without sufficient language to convey to others what has happened to us. We are at a loss for words. Words fail us. We clutch for clichés, or we clam up and let someone else do the talking. We are a verbal species, we humans, and it is terrifying to be without the words for something important in our lives. Even when we are able to matter-of-factly communicate the violence we’ve experienced, if the people around us don’t respond to our words as we would expect or anticipate, as when a parent gets angry with us when we disclose abuse, or pretends the abuse was no big deal, or acts as though we haven’t said anything at all, we can feel crazy. At a fundamental level, we wonder if our words have any impact. Are we not saying what we think we are saying? Do people really not care? We may wonder if what we are doing when we are speaking is the same thing that other people seem to do when they speak.
We who, as young people or adults, survive sexual or other violence are also taught, paradoxically, that our words are too powerful. My stepfather was hurt and disappointed when I resisted his advances—his suffering was my fault. He told me all the ways I would harm my mother if she found out what he was doing to me; her anguish would be my fault for telling, not his fault for sexually abusing me. I learned how dangerous a misspoken word or slip of the tongue could be.
I spent years with a sense of impotence and fear around my speech: maybe what I say is unhearable, is actually incomprehensible; maybe I’m still not working this language thing right.
When I was finally able to write about my stepfather’s violence, just a few months before I would start the process of untangling myself from his web of control, I detailed every damn bullshit threat that he’d made, took it apart, raged at it, questioned it, turned it over to see the impotence on the other side. I wrote down everything he did and forced me to keep silent about or to rename. The actions he called “teaching” or “lovemaking” or “sex” or “help,” for instance, I called by their true name: rape. I began to undo his occupation of my very mouth. He had infiltrated even my words with his violence, and after he was gone from my physical body and everyday life, I had the distance I needed to roll out my words on the page and risk examining the wounds, and begin to discover how to put myself back together again.
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