because the mere act of putting down words begins to “objectify” them. After that, the more they’re revised, the more distanced the writer becomes from the prose. When the text is read and responded to by peers and teachers, more steps are taken away from the trauma itself, as it recedes a little further into the background as a more natural part of our internal landscape.
What may be more important here is that these alternating cycles of subjectivity/objectivity occur almost simultaneously or close to each other in time, thereby making them more immediately relevant and applicable for us to begin perceiving our traumatic experience in different ways. I believe this process may become more meaningful for writers than widely-spaced oral discussions with a counselor. Of course, this process can further develop writers’ sense of rhetorical flexibility, which can serve their future thinking and writing. In short, a writing class (also a safe environment) just may be where the rubber best meets the road: when the intangible trauma meets the visible words on the page, combustion is more likely, as one feeds the other.
Writing about trauma, then, occurs in cycles of subjectivity and objectivity, hot and cold. Experienced writing teachers are well familiar with these alternating cycles, though they don’t necessarily occur consistently, nor are they of equal duration. We are deft at reading and writing processes that must run hot and perch up close to us, when fluency and ideas, through the gush of words and images, dominate our internal universe. On the other hand, we are equally deft at distancing ourselves, at running colder, when we revise and edit. For these reasons and more, we can help students with their trauma and writing at the same time.
Truth in advertising: teaching writing about trauma is not for everyone. You have to feel the need, and you have to feel confident. Such teaching takes courage, even a kind of gall, which often comes with experience, when you know you’ve worked with enough different writers and texts to know that writing really does work. In this section, then, I offer some basic advice about the roles of teachers.
Preparing to Teach Writing about Trauma
Many teachers who choose to focus on trauma in the writing class will be well-prepared to do so, even though their backgrounds and terminology will somewhat differ from others. Nonetheless, I feel strongly that the following five elements be seriously considered when teachers prepare to help students mend ruptures in their lives.
Understand General Semantics
First, instructors should thoroughly understand and be able to apply the basic principles of general semantics. Hayakawa and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action (1991 or later) remains the best introductory source. The over-arching principle is expressed in the semanticist’s mantra, “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing.” You can also think of it as, “intensional orientation vs. extensional orientation”—the world out there vs. the world inside our heads, i.e., our representations of reality.
For example, before soldiers go into battle, their inner consciousness may be full of patriotic movie scenes, song lyrics, and texts that glorify war. As Twain would say, they may be full of “gunpowder and glory.” However, when these soldiers actually step into a real battle zone, their idealizations of war can starkly differ from actuality. As Johnson (1946) and others have explained, such idealization can lead to frustration, which in turn can demoralize us. The internal constructs formed in words and pictures can be way different from outer reality. In terms of trauma, over time, one may “abstract from” the original experience certain elements that can exaggerate the actual event. One problem here is that traumatic events can reside inside us, frozen in time, and not change. The process of “recovery” via writing is to begin changing those frozen elements into different, more realistic, or more flexible ideas. A related concept here is the Is of Identity, a term that describes an unchanging or frozen sense of who we are as a person. The problem is our labeling of people in specific points in time, and then assuming that reality is unchanging—that those labeled will always be what they were branded. Here, is denotes or implies a state of being that lasts forever.
For example, one of my students lied when his mother asked him if his brother was a drug-user. This student’s younger brother had been arrested for marijuana possession. My student carried guilt about lying to his mother for several years, so he at least somewhat represented his identity to himself as a liar: “John is a liar”—not in that one conversation, but for all time. As well, he and his family regarded the jailed sibling as a drug addict: “Rob is a drug addict.” The facts, though, were that John was not a liar for eternity. He lied to his mother once, yet the simple word, is, labeled and froze him forever in that state. Nor was his brother Rob a drug addict forever (if he ever was).
A related concept familiar to writing teachers also applies to this same student, context. I learned through John’s writing that a good portion of the guilt he carried was connected to where his trauma occurred, a small, conservative rural community in the Midwest. John and Rob’s parents felt especially shamed by Rob’s arrest because “everyone in town knew about it.” He and his family therefore felt isolated and looked down upon in their community. The best teaching approach was to convince John to “enlarge his context” by researching the history of minor drug arrests in different locations in America, as well as overseas. I believed he would come to regard his brother’s arrest as “not such a big deal” if he were to view it through a wider lens.
The ladder of abstraction is another important principle surrounding how we may think about past trauma. Writing teachers seem to spend much of their careers telling students to “get down to specifics” when encountering lofty generalizations. The bank teller who habitually described a robbery she experienced as “nightmarish” needed to dissect or partition this abstraction into smaller pieces before she could begin to deal with it a bit more rationally. Following is a series of questions (and the student’s responses) that was made by the teacher and this student’s small writing response group, all focused on the central question, “What exactly made the trauma nightmarish?”
“Was the robber holding a weapon?”
“Oh yes!”
“What kind of weapon was it?”
“A gun.”
“Did you actually see it?”
“Well, no, but he was holding it in his sweatshirt pocket.”
“So . . . he could have been holding a pen or just using his fist?”
“Well, I guess that’s possible.”
You get the idea. Other semantics principles are equally important as those summarized here, especially either/or language and thinking, our habit of seeing the world in polarized terms; the differences between reports, inferences, and judgments, as well as between denotations and connotations; and advertising and propaganda techniques, such as repetition and association. If your students are also working with actual images (see Chapter 4), these principles can also apply to visual renderings. You may also want to explore some basic tenets of Gestalt psychology and semiotics.
Select Readings that Weave a Web of Connections
Another important consideration is deciding what students will read and why—texts that they can link to other texts, as well as to their own and their peers’ writing. I use books that very clearly provide essential information about writing and trauma in organized and accessible ways, such as Louise De Salvo’s (2000) book noted earlier. I also use Anderson’s and McCurdy’s anthology, also noted earlier, because it is more academic in tone and demonstrates the variety of professionals who seriously study writing and trauma. I also use a number of separate articles and excerpts that focus on insightful details about language and trauma. All or most of the readings should be discussed in class, so that students can draw some lines of connection
