Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 13
Trauma
ОглавлениеBy trauma, I mean a violating experience that has long-term emotional, physical, and/or spiritual consequences that may have immediate or delayed effects. One reason the term trauma is useful conceptually is its association with the diagnostic label Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).22 PTSD is one of the few clinical diagnostic categories that recognizes social problems (such as war or the Holocaust) as partially responsible for the symptoms identified.23 One perspective on PTSD is that it “adapts well to the feminist assertion that a woman’s symptoms cannot be understood as solely individual, considered outside of her social context, or prevented without significant changes in social conditions.”24 For any woman who develops a distorted relationship to food, to her body, and to weight, introjecting cultural expectations and gender-degrading experiences (including the plethora of media images of women as sexual objects) set the tone for how she relates to her self. Sexual abuse in the family further imprints these cultural messages.
Psychohistorian Robert Lifton has delineated five key characteristics of trauma:
1. Trauma leaves an indelible imprint in the form of intense, sometimes repressed, memories that are often death-related. There is no time limit on trauma, and its pain can endure with fresh intensity for a lifetime. There are always residual feelings around the trauma, including anxiety. Sometimes, paradoxically, the behavioral and emotional response to trauma is a mask of invulnerability.
2. Trauma can generate death guilt or other forms of self-condemnation. The victim tends to blame himself or herself for not having done enough to prevent the trauma or the events leading up to the trauma. There is a sense of failed enactment.
3. Trauma creates psychic numbing, the diminished capacity to feel, in its victims. Numbing begins as a necessary form of adaptation. Feelings must be closed out as a way to survive the traumatic experience. Later, however, the numbing itself tends to continue and endure as an inappropriate and self-constricting defensive posture.
4. Trauma profoundly affects human relationships which can become infused with suspicion and vulnerable to disruption. Help or friendship may be perceived as counterfeit nurturance, as insincere and unreliable. Trust in people and one’s general community can be impaired and difficult to recover.
5. Trauma brings on a struggle with meaning at various levels of existence. One seeks to give inner form to one’s experience. One’s sense of personal continuity—indeed one’s lifeline—has been interrupted, and there is an effort to find new grounding and connectedness for the self.25
Most survivors feel pursued by a chronic sense of loss, what Lifton calls the survivor’s life of grief.26 A survivor mourns for lost family, lost faith, lost hope, and her former self—who she was prior to the violations. What has been “taken” from her cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged in a culture that refuses to recognize the atrocity. The concept of PTSD has helped bring the inner reality and the outer reality of the survivor together. It is my intention to draw out the gendered nature of PTSD as it manifests itself in the form of food, body, and weight preoccupations for the survivor of incest. I will also expose the religious roots that often give meaning to such traumatic experiences and symptoms among the women interviewed.