Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith’s Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, in front of some wet, greened concrete. On the card, a person is dressed all in red with a blindfold on and their arms bound to their body. Their legs are not bound. They are surrounded on two sides by swords which are sticking straight up out of the ground. The land they’re standing on is speckled with small pools of water, and there is a castle in the distance.
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“Trauma poses a fundamental challenge to the constitution of human relationships.” — Shelly Rambo
I often think about theologian Shelly Rambo’s writing on the surplus characteristic of trauma; the way it refuses the closure of an historical place or time, and has a tendency to spill into the present. This often plays out in the venue of intimate relationships which, more than an exchange of “simple knowledge” writes Rambo, involve a "transmission of what is unknown and what could not be contained in the past.”
One of the central points in Rambo’s book, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, is that traumatic experiences are not fully understood by the person who’s experienced them at the time when they happen. This poses a problem for the need that person has to testify and be witnessed later on. The ungraspable nature of traumatic experience paired with the mercurial quality of memory may mean that such an experience is something which can never be communicated fully or directly.
To complicate things further, much of what constitutes testimony post-trauma can be really painful to receive or bear witness to which may compound shame for all involved. Nonetheless, Rambo writes that “we are implicated in each others’ traumas…tied to what we do not comprehend about each other’s pasts.”
One of the great challenges with trauma seems to be that when something has happened that’s not been adequately grasped or understood, it’s a struggle to articulate later and is thus difficult so see by the very support that it relies on to find something resembling resolution. For these reasons, Shelly Rambo calls witnessing “a middle activity” that “allows the witness to see, but never directly; to hear, but never directly; and to touch, but never directly.”
I’ve been wondering about how this capacity to witness applies to the difficulty of bearing witness to one’s own suffering. I’m thinking about Melody Beattie’s Codependents’ Guide to the Twelve Steps, which she opens up with an anecdote about a tortured relationship she once had with a loved one who had a tortured relationship with alcohol.
She writes, “It took me months to learn the truth: I didn’t need to prove to [that person] how much I hurt. I needed to become aware of how much pain I was in. I needed to take care of myself.” She’s talking about the necessity of witness. Not to what someone else is going through, or needs, or should do. But to her own pain, which was the very last thing she wanted to look at.
I’ve thought and written a lot about the problematic aspects of this notion of codependence. It relies on an uncomplicated binary of self and other, for instance, and can negate the significance of our attachments to those we love. I write all the time about curiosity, and deep listening, and responsiveness to the other. But it’s remained true that there are times when a radical turning-back-toward-my-own-stuff is the medicine.