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suturing the rupture: what writing about trauma can do

This is my aftermath, this writing. This is where grief or something more unlanguage-able has brought me. Medicine is supposed to ease hurts, soothe spasms, turn the knots inside out, is supposed to quiet the voices, allow focus or a little joy or peace return, is supposed to settle the stomach or senses or skin, is supposed to make something better. This is homeopathic practice: writing brings me into the pain, the misunderstanding, the trauma, the loss, and turns them around for me to examine. There is an inoculation, a lancing and letting off of infection, a suturing together again. There is deep medicine in this, in bringing the terror up, shining a light on its vulnerable edges, then letting it back down. And there is an offering left in the aftermath, a transcription of procedure, a tracing the outline of a fragile, fractured, healing psyche and body. This artifact shows all the stages we go through: what we were, what fire we went through, how we shadowboxed and strove through to the other side to find what remained of our soul and pulled it back through to live again. (2013)

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Trauma has impacted nearly every single person I know, directly and/or indirectly. Is this true for you, too? We may take trauma into our bodies and lives through our parents’ physical violence, or sexual misuse or molestation, through their name calling or threats or mind games or psychological torture. It may be an assault by a stranger, someone who took us by surprise on the street or in our home. It may be a natural disaster, like living through an earthquake or hurricane. It may be a physical illness, like cancer. It may be living under white supremacy, and/or other forms of oppression. It may be living or fighting in a warzone. It may be the legacy of our parents’ or grandparents’ traumas, our ancestors’ experiences of political, cultural, or intimate violences.

Merriam-Webster defines trauma as, variously: an injury to the body (as a wound, a cut); a “disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury;” and an emotional upset. The word trauma derives from the Greek word traume, meaning “a wound, a hurt, a defeat.”

A disorder state. A defeat.

In my workshops, I define trauma, quite broadly, as any experience which confounds understanding, and which leaves a person feeling silenced: either without access to language to describe it, and/or unwitnessed/unheard/shut down when they attempted to speak about the experience. I think of a traumatic experience as one that causes damage to bodily or psychological or spiritual integrity, one we’re not able to immediately integrate or process, that overwhelms, and then transforms, our understanding of ourselves and our reality.

A traumatic experience is generally thought of as something out of the norm—except, of course, for those living with incest or domestic violence, living in war zones, or experiencing political persecution or race-hatred: this is our normal.

In its most 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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We want to get back into “right relationship” with our own words—meaning, we want to feel a sense of agency with and through language. Our words do have power, though not in the destructive sense that our perpetrators, families, or communities often claim. The story we tell about our words also has power. For years, I repeated to myself what my stepfather had trained me to believe (and what society and media reinforced)—that I didn’t deserve to speak, that no one would listen to me or care even if they could hear me, that my words didn’t matter. Writing practice is what finally broke into and through those lies. Writing brought me, and so many of the writers I know and have written with, into a different relationship with words, language, stories, and with the words, the language and stories used against us.

So this is what writing practice can help us accomplish: finding right—and even playful—relationship with creativity and language. We are writing about our lives, and while we deserve for our lives to be received seriously, we also deserve laughter, silliness, and play. Through laughter, we find breath. Through play, we reconnect with our intuitive, creative being, what Black lesbian feminist author Audre Lorde describes as the “yes within ourselves.” We get to have that yes, our yes, back, as well as our no, and have them mean exactly what we want them to this time.

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My dictionary says the word heal means, first, “to make a person or injury healthy and whole.” A later definition: “to repair or rectify something that causes discord and animosity.”

Is healing more than the cessation of bleeding? More than simply having the bone set, wound scab over and begin to physically mend? When we talk about healing from sexual violence, I often hear the language of psychic wounds: the wounding of our trust, our relationship with instinct and memory, the scarring of our sexuality, our sense of being able to be safe around other people or in the world, even within ourselves. How do those injuries find succor, when there’s nothing to set in a cast or suture up? How do we heal the stories of brokenness, heal the belief that we’re no longer whole, that we are unfixable?

Many authors have written about the transformative power of creativity. Pat Schneider, in Writing Alone and With Others, reminds her readers that when we write, we are writers, and that through writing, we can “begin at any time to be free.” Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way encourages a “recovery” of and through creative expression. Live Through This, edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev, is a collection of essays by artists and writers who’ve battled deeply self-destructive urges using creativity and artistic expression. Social psychologist James Pennebaker, in his book Opening Up, reports on the results of his studies with college students at the University of Texas at Austin, which revealed that “excessive holding back of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can place people at risk for both major and minor diseases,” whereas “confronting our deepest thoughts and feelings can have remarkable short- and long-term health benefits.” Dr. Pennebaker found that those students who wrote deeply and expressively about one of their most difficult life experiences for just twenty minutes a day, for four consecutive days (and only for those four days), subsequently received better grades in their classes, showed an improved immune system (as evidenced by fewer visits to the campus infirmary), and reported that they felt happier and less depressed. What we hold inside us impacts every aspect of our lives. Writing about that which has been inhibited (unshared or unexamined) can not only free up the mind to higher levels of thinking, but can also improve our physical health.

The creation of art enacts release and transformation; exposure to art invites different ways of thinking, feeling, and being into the rooms of ourselves. Creative practice reengages us with our deep instinctual self, with the life-flow of our erotic self, which is our whole, embodied and empowered self. Creative practice can be a suture, a cleansing of the wound, a soothing of the inflammation, and a manifestation of the scar.

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Art makes (a) way. Art reveals what’s possible—enacts possibility. A brave and engaged poet once commented, in one of my writing workshops, “You can say things in poems you don’t really say in casual conversation.” We heal when we transform a wounding—either physically, through the body’s regenerative capacity, or psychologically, though an alteration in our understanding of the experience that caused the wound, our ability to express it (concretely or metaphorically), or our sense of, finally, being heard and understood, of no longer being all alone with the violation and pain. Because it offers a way to express difficult or charged experiences or thoughts (such as sexual trauma or sexual longing) through metaphor and other abstract means (“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson advised us), creative expression provides outlet and inlet, deep risk and safety, camouflage and exposure: creativity is large, contradicts, contains multitudes, just like us, as Walt Whitman proclaimed.

I have come to believe that we can change the world this way, through writing deeply and openly—I mean, with this and other practices of discovering and living ourselves into the vast elemental of our creativity. “Art, in its living and working out, is not about accomplishment. It is about energy and time and discipline and self-criticism and pursuit and letting go. Art is not about being. It is about becoming,” wrote philosopher Ladelle McWhorter. Don’t ever think that our work, the very practice of writing—the very fact of taking the time to sit down with one’s own thoughts and commit them to paper—is not revolutionary. We undermine the old teachings. We take the old language and turn it inside out. We name our hidden truths. We true our hidden names. We crack the surface of the advertised world and take hold of the reins of our lives. As long as we keep on writing and knowing each other as constantly changing peers in this process, as long as we are free to tell ourselves and our stories however we choose, as long as we play in the memory and myth of the thickness of poetic language, we will walk ourselves, together, into freedom.

Use your pen to thread the needle

Give yourself ten minutes. Find somewhere you’ll be comfortable writing, whether that’s at a quiet kitchen table or noisy cafe. Open your notebook, turn to a new page, and, at the top of the page, write, “This is what I want my words to do…” Complete the sentence with whatever comes up for you, whatever wants to be written. Then write the phrase again, and complete it again. Begin again as many times as it takes, until you find yourself in a flow, and follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go. If you get stuck, you can always begin again.