Trauma studies and trauma theory have been integrated into fields other than psychology. “Trauma,” Alexiana Fry writes in her academic monograph, Trauma Talks in the Hebrew Bible: Speech Act Theory and Trauma Hermeneutics, “moves between the individual and communal, silent and spoken, and private and political. Trauma’s very nature is as messy as we perceive it to be, never remaining in one categorization, and yet always remaining in all of them.”
This sounds absolutely fascinating. I love your closing idea of survivor-centric vs trauma-centric hermeneutic, and have also found narrative to be necessary to my own healing (or re-writing/making).
"Flop" was a new term for me as it comes to dysregulation, and I'd love to hear and learn more about it. The idea that "the goal is not to get beyond trauma but to go through trauma" is precisely why I named my cohort "THROUGH" and focus my work on helping others to do so, while identifying and telling their own stories.
I've found the Harry Potter stories to be extremely helpful and accessible for processing trauma. I use examples throughout my work in the cohort and elsewhere. There are many wonderful illustrations to pull that are easily identifiable, widely known, and offer an shortcut to understanding the experience of trauma and/or healing for many.
The difficulty for me is the subjectivity and the debate that rages around these issues.
With COVID, some people feel traumatized by being forced to take something that is only now being disclosed as potentially more injurious than actually getting COVID and at the potential loss of career/job if not willing to take it.
Ukraine was definitely attacked by Russia, but that doesn't make Ukraine a sort of saintly nation as everyone knows how corrupt they have been and continue to be. Unaccountable aid and the using of American taxpayers money is terribly traumatizing when considering the problems here domestically.
Moderate Arab/Muslims who either disagree publically or protest the more fundamentalist sects within ANY Muslim nation are murdered. Women, homosexuals, Christians, Jews. They're all in peril to Islamist/Jihadist/Fundamentalist regimes. To Jesus followers, this should be traumatizing.
Reversing a bad precedent in Roe and allowing for states to decide whether or not to kill children in the womb is anything but a return of power to the citizens and greater liberty for both women and the unborn is simply either ignorant of constitutional law and the governing of our nation or a take from a partisan.
Guns are everywhere, except in the hands of the law abiding poor where crime is the highest, gun laws and restrictions are the greatest and the poor and marginalized have the least access to them for self-preservation. States are not being held to account on maintaining the mentally ill who should be disqualified from purchase while the working poor who live in major cities have the most impediments placed before them along the way to legal ownership. To someone who has access and can defend themselves, knowing there are citizens who can't is traumatizing.
Here recently, more and more studies, data and scientists have publically spoken out about the current climate disaster awaiting us and refute most of if not all of the popular narratives being fed by national and international political bodies causing most people to question the actual intent of these organizations. When ill intent is discerned, this is incredibly traumatizing.
When universities, colleges, seminaries, television, cable, newspapers, legacy media, Hollywood and other cultural influencers parrot a narrative that induces trauma in certain sectors of society, one has to question the motive of the narrators and not those experiencing the trauma. We can agree that people are experiencing trauma or being traumatized but in my opinion, some of it could be avoided if honest brokers were discussing, debating and having conversations, apolitically, unantagonistically and genuinely thinking of others in the best of motives instead of as enemies, others and/or with malevolent intent.
When we fail to perceive how much progress has been made, how much better things actually are, and how able we are to overcome so many of the problems and issues of our day, we are failing to properly situate the causes of trauma to people and the possibility of ending traumatizing behaviors and narratives that can allow for healing, reconciling and redeeming to take place.
Here are some recommendations for trauma novels. What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo; Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas; Survivor Cafe by Elizabeth Rosner; All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore
This sounds absolutely fascinating. I love your closing idea of survivor-centric vs trauma-centric hermeneutic, and have also found narrative to be necessary to my own healing (or re-writing/making).
"Flop" was a new term for me as it comes to dysregulation, and I'd love to hear and learn more about it. The idea that "the goal is not to get beyond trauma but to go through trauma" is precisely why I named my cohort "THROUGH" and focus my work on helping others to do so, while identifying and telling their own stories.
I've found the Harry Potter stories to be extremely helpful and accessible for processing trauma. I use examples throughout my work in the cohort and elsewhere. There are many wonderful illustrations to pull that are easily identifiable, widely known, and offer an shortcut to understanding the experience of trauma and/or healing for many.
Thanks again for your work!
when we focus on the person we have a survivor centric hermeneutic, and when we focus on the pain we have a trauma centric hermeneutic.
I like your comment here Scott.
This is an interesting book .
The difficulty for me is the subjectivity and the debate that rages around these issues.
With COVID, some people feel traumatized by being forced to take something that is only now being disclosed as potentially more injurious than actually getting COVID and at the potential loss of career/job if not willing to take it.
Ukraine was definitely attacked by Russia, but that doesn't make Ukraine a sort of saintly nation as everyone knows how corrupt they have been and continue to be. Unaccountable aid and the using of American taxpayers money is terribly traumatizing when considering the problems here domestically.
Moderate Arab/Muslims who either disagree publically or protest the more fundamentalist sects within ANY Muslim nation are murdered. Women, homosexuals, Christians, Jews. They're all in peril to Islamist/Jihadist/Fundamentalist regimes. To Jesus followers, this should be traumatizing.
Reversing a bad precedent in Roe and allowing for states to decide whether or not to kill children in the womb is anything but a return of power to the citizens and greater liberty for both women and the unborn is simply either ignorant of constitutional law and the governing of our nation or a take from a partisan.
Guns are everywhere, except in the hands of the law abiding poor where crime is the highest, gun laws and restrictions are the greatest and the poor and marginalized have the least access to them for self-preservation. States are not being held to account on maintaining the mentally ill who should be disqualified from purchase while the working poor who live in major cities have the most impediments placed before them along the way to legal ownership. To someone who has access and can defend themselves, knowing there are citizens who can't is traumatizing.
Here recently, more and more studies, data and scientists have publically spoken out about the current climate disaster awaiting us and refute most of if not all of the popular narratives being fed by national and international political bodies causing most people to question the actual intent of these organizations. When ill intent is discerned, this is incredibly traumatizing.
When universities, colleges, seminaries, television, cable, newspapers, legacy media, Hollywood and other cultural influencers parrot a narrative that induces trauma in certain sectors of society, one has to question the motive of the narrators and not those experiencing the trauma. We can agree that people are experiencing trauma or being traumatized but in my opinion, some of it could be avoided if honest brokers were discussing, debating and having conversations, apolitically, unantagonistically and genuinely thinking of others in the best of motives instead of as enemies, others and/or with malevolent intent.
When we fail to perceive how much progress has been made, how much better things actually are, and how able we are to overcome so many of the problems and issues of our day, we are failing to properly situate the causes of trauma to people and the possibility of ending traumatizing behaviors and narratives that can allow for healing, reconciling and redeeming to take place.
Here are some recommendations for trauma novels. What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo; Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas; Survivor Cafe by Elizabeth Rosner; All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore