Places
& Books
“Memory returns // with rubber sandals, // as if the footsteps stick // to the same stones.” Vasilis Vasilikos
“Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” Annie Ernaux
“The trauma-related issues with which the client presents for help, I now believe, are in truth a “red badge of courage” that tell the story of what happened even more eloquently than the events each individual consciously remembers.” Janina Fisher
Places
“Let this beautiful world be perpetuated // by recycling tomorrow within its sources like the time I was born as if it emerged, every morning, for the first time, from the rosy gauzes of its birth….” Nikiphoros Vrettakos
The distribution
“Most likely, no one will ask me what I did with my soul / psyche. However, I owe a response before I end my rhyming // monologue. ……Well, // I cut my psyche with painful scissors into small // sheets, small pieces of paper, small lightnings // and I distribute it to passersby.” Nikiphoros Vrettakos
Books
The Years by Annie Ernaux
“By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.” Annie Ernaux
As I wrote in a previous post I only came across Annie Ernau’x work recently, and since then I’ve read several of her books, but if I were to recommend only one it would probably be The Years, which to some extent contains references to events from her other books. Critics have heralded the book as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. When I put the book down I felt that Ernaux had by weaving the personal with the collective created a wonderful tapestry, and had managed to “capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.” One could say it is a memoir, but a different kind of memoir that succeeds in presenting “an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation.” Ernaux situates her own story within the story of her generation, a nation, the world, while also reflecting on the book she is writing as she writes it. She presents memories and reflects on memory.
Ernaux has succeeded in writing both personally and collectively. She writes: “Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same.” Her book is sociological, political and cultural and contains her memories of historical events, of popular culture, of discourse, and the subtle transformations of language and culture through time. It is written in short vignettes and it is permeated by subtle irony and sarcasm. She blends memories, dreams, facts and reflections on remembering and writing. The narrative spans a timeframe of over sixty years, from her birth in 1940 to 2006, and it moves from her childhood and working class upbringing in Normandy to her years studying and then teaching French literature in a lycée, an illegal abortion, moving to a Parisian suburb, being married, divorcing, becoming a writer, raising children and becoming a grandmother, her parents’ deaths, her sister’s death before she was born. It contains descriptions of photos and family meals at different life stages.
Meanwhile, she manages to take us on a journey through more than six decades of national and global history and cultural changes:
WWII and the post war climate, the genocide of the Jews, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, the stark reality of thousands of children dying from diseases like diarrhoea, convulsions, diphtheria, and tonsils being removed from “children with delicate throats, who woke screaming from the ether anesthesia and were forced to drink boiling milk,” and then a different reality when children are being “vaccinated, monitored, and presented each month at the town hall’s infant weigh-in,” abortion rights and what it was like when abortions were illegal, feminism, the first man on the moon, the war in Algeria, the cold war and the nuclear threat, May 1968, the Greek juntas, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the massacre at the Munich Olympics, the anti-Pinochet demonstrations after the assassination of Alliende, Kennedy’s assassination, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, unemployment, immigration, the refugee crisis, the explosion of consumerism: “the profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs,” fashion trends and advertising slogans, advertising becoming society’s cultural educator providing models for how to live, behave, and furnish the home, AIDS, the mad cow disease, terrorist attacks, September 11, advances in technology, the mobile phone, “a miraculous and disturbing object,” the changing tenor of coupledom and parenthood, French presidential elections and presidents, the abolishment of the death penalty, the 39 hour week, books, magazines, TV programmes and paintings, writers and artists, films and film stars, and singers and songs, poems and lyrics, Edith Piaf, the Beatles, American music, Briggite Bardot and James Dean, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Lawrence Durrell, Primo Levi….., philosophers, critics, and sociologists: Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Chomsky, Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Ivan Illich……, the switch to the euro, the free market, the economic crisis, the homeless becoming part of the urban landscape, Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, women in the world veiled from head to toe, conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Africa, whose suffering never seemed to end, the United States, spreading its branches over the face of the earth…….
She records shifts in language, discourse and culture. Now, she writes:
“the injunction to ‘pamper oneself’ came from every quarter,” and we were inundated with explanations of self, new words like ‘frustration’ and ‘gratification’ and new ways of being that emphasized “feeling good about oneself, a mixture of self-assurance and indifference to others.” Collective introspection provided models for putting the self into words. Identity became an overriding concern that was something one needed to “rediscover, assume, assert, express – a supreme and precious commodity.” Consuming became “a kind of ethic, a philosophy, the undisputed shape of our lives…. a sweet and happy dictatorship that no one contested.” We lived in a profusion of everything, “objects, information, and expert opinions” and “with all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live”……
The narrative is like a rollercoaster ride through time, Ernaux manages to capture the ineffable passage of time, and with her layered narrative to reveal the “lived dimension of history.” She avoids using “I” and uses the “we” of a chorus instead. She uses the French pronoun on, which Alison Strayer often translates as we. She shifts to the third person “she” to refer to herself, the writer or when describing photos of herself and family, for instance. This use of “she” creates a dispassionate, detached ambience and exudes a kind of neutrality. The absence of the “I” allows for a progressive depersonalisation of her narrative.
Extracts from the book:
“Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments….. Her main concern is the choice between ‘I’ and ‘she’. There is something too permanent about ‘I’, something shrunken and stifling, whereas ‘she’ is too exterior and remote…..
It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being – freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself.”
Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors by Janina Fisher
“Emotional healing of traumatic wounds has to be attachment-based. Like long-lost young relatives, the alienated disowned parts must be invited to the table and welcomed into the heart and mind and arms of the client.” Janina Fisher
Janina Fisher is a clinical psychologist, who has specialized in trauma treatment. Her book focuses on trauma and how to treat it. With her treatment model she strives to integrate a neurobiologically informed understanding of trauma, dissociation, and attachment, in language that is accessible to psychologists and therapists, but also, trauma survivors and the public in general. Summarily, her approach to trauma focuses on transforming the relationship to one’s self through replacing internalized emotions and others’ projections with compassionate acceptance, developing dual awareness, which is the ability to stay connected to the difficult emotional or somatic experience while also observing it from a slight mindful distance, repairing early attachment failures and ruptures in the present, and integrating past and present.
Fisher’s approach uses the Structural Dissociation model to understand trauma symptoms, which claims that when trauma occurs, the personality splits into what she calls the “going on with normal life” part of the self and the trauma-related parts, which reflect our basic survival instincts and responses to threat, and which are formed as coping mechanisms to deal with traumatic experiences. She identifies these parts, which have contributed to survival, as the attach, fight, flight, freeze and submit parts. These animal defense survival strategies that reduced the level of harm or enhanced survival become split off automatic responses activated by trauma-related stimuli later in life.
Trauma often results in the adult self or the “going on with normal life”part of the self blending or identifiying with different younger parts and their emotions and inclinations, rather than being aware of a larger self that contains parts. As a result, being unable to recognize parts by the roles they play and to differentiate emotional experiences that belong to the past from those related to the present, people can get triggered by stimuli or events in the present and hijacked by automatic and conditioned ways of responding to threat or distress. We now know that the causes of people’s difficulties are not just the original event but the reactivation of implicit memories by trauma-related stimuli that automatically mobilize the emergency stress response.
Fisher writes: “Without education about the phenomenon of implicit memory and a prefrontal cortex capable of taking in this new information, post-traumatic dysregulation, hypervigilance, impulsivity or shutdown will be repeatedly reinforced by the simple phenomenon of triggering.” Therefeore, the ability to differentiate being triggered and being threatened is key to recovery. She claims that it is necessary to first focus on recognizing and working in present time with the spontaneous evoking of implicit memory and animal defense survival responses rather than on creating a verbal narrative of past experiences.
Fisher claims that the theory of Structural Dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2006), rooted in a neuroscience perspective and well-accepted throughout Europe as a trauma model, describes “how the brain’s innate physical structure and two separate, specialized hemispheres facilitate left brain-right brain disconnection under conditions of threat. Capitalizing on the tendency of the left brain to remain positive, task-oriented, and logical under stress, these writers hypothesized that the disconnected left brain side of the personality stays focused on the tasks of daily living, while the other hemisphere fosters an implicit right brain self that remains in survival mode, braced for danger, ready to run, frozen in fear, praying for rescue, or too ashamed to do anything but submit.”
Additionally, the development of left brain dominance is only achieved very gradually over the course of the first eighteen years of life and the corpus callosum that makes possible right brain-left brain communication, also develops slowly (Cozolino, 2002; Teicher, 2004, cited in Fisher, 2017). Thus, writes Fisher, in the early years of childhood right brain experience is relatively independent of left brain experience, lending itself to splitting should the need arise.
Her model to treating trauma is also influenced by Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model, which applies equally to all human beings, not just traumatized individuals with dissociative symptomatology, as well as, clinical hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapies. Mindfulness is used to help people develop dual awareness, so that they can “unblend” from trauma parts, which are stuck at the time they were formed. The goal of the approach is for the personality to gradually integrate and for the trauma symptoms to subside as people get to know their self better and are able to increase their inner and outer sense of safety.
She also recommends specialized training and trauma education for therpasits and clinicians in this area, as she believes that trauma should be a speciality because the treatment of trauma requires specialized knowledge, skills and interventions. The book provides a solid grasp of ways to work with traumatic attachment, and with post traumatic and dissociative symptomatology. She provides a number of practices and interventions to create an internal sense of safety and compassionate connection to all parts of the self.
Finally, one point I’d like to make is that like many theories and books in the field of psychology the focus is rather individualistic. There is no mention to how society can often reinforce trauma and further impact people’s lives. Also, a lot of trauma or interference with development and maturation in childhood and adolescence take place outside the home. In his book, The Myth of Normal (chapter 10), Gabor Maté writes: “Suffice it for now to say that the quality of early caregiving is heavily, even decisively, determined by the societal context in which it takes place. As we will see, children are increasingly set upon by an accumulation of potent influences—social, economic, and cultural—that overwhelm and, in many ways, subjugate their internal emotional apparatus to imperatives that have nothing to do with well-being; that are, in fact, inimical to the healthy growth of the mind. “Such growth is becoming seriously endangered by modern institutions and social patterns,” according to Dr. Greenspan. “There exists a growing disregard for the importance of mind-building emotional experiences in almost every aspect of daily life including childcare, education, and family life.”
Often the field of psychology maintains understandings and practices that draw attention away from the material and social underpinnings of psychological distress. Perhaps it is necessary to reconceptualize people and their symptomatology or traumas not as isolated phenomena seprate from objective reality or surroundings, but as interpenetrated by and interwoven with the political, cultural and socio-economic realities that they reside in. In doing this, therapy would facitlitate the deeper understanding of how personal traumas are interwoven with sociopolitical realities. Including this level of processing would facilitate deeper healing, accelerate the process of recovery, and increase people’s capacity to both feel and be safe.
Ηaving said this, I think the book is definitely worth reading, especially for people working with trauma, since it is sensitively written by someone with decades of experience in this area. It has some valuable comments on diagnoses and diagnosing and is rich in information on trauma and its legacy. Finally, it provides many examples and clear guidance of how to implement interventions and practices to treat complex trauma.
Extracts from the book:
“…. from a neurobiologically informed perspective, they [the symptoms] are “survival resources” (Ogden et al., 2006), ways that the body and mind adapted for optimal survival in a dangerous world. In the worst of circumstances, our survival resources save us—at a cost.”
“Dissociative splitting is a mental ability, not just a symptom. The ability to quickly retrieve information and act on it automatically and efficiently, without interference from emotion or intrusive thoughts, is central to the medical professional’s ability to save lives. Dissociative splitting is also a prerequisite for the athlete on whom the team depends at a critical moment; it contributes to the ability for peak performance enjoyed by actors, musicians, public speakers, and politicians. Dissociation becomes pathological only when it is unconscious and involuntary, under the control of triggers. As a mental ability, it can be used consciously, thoughtfully, and voluntarily. The goal is not to “cure it” or prevent it but to help clients use it wisely in the service of healing and recovery.”
“The better the quality of our early attachment experiences, the greater our capacity to tolerate distress as we develop into adulthood. Our capacity for affect tolerance, self-soothing, and achievement of an integrated sense of self later in life is dependent upon the self-regulatory or self-soothing abilities acquired during the first 2 years of life (Shore, 2003), including both the ability for interactive regulation (to be soothed by others) and auto-regulation (the ability to soothe ourselves). Affect tolerance in adulthood appears to be directly tied to the smooth acceleration, braking, and deceleration of the autonomic nervous system (Ogden et al., 2006) developed in very early secure attachment relationships.
“We come into the world with innate drives to attach, explore, laugh and play, bond with our social group, and nurture the young. Even as young children, we have a developing brain that offers us such resources as curiosity, compassion, creativity and wonder (Schwartz, 2001). We also have the mental ability of imagination: if all is lost, we can still dream, still imagine a life we’ve never known. But, under chronic conditions of neglect, trauma, or frightened and frightening parenting, our bodies organize to prioritize the mobilization of animal defense survival responses and anticipation of danger (Ogden et al., 2006; Van der Kolk, 2014). The “luxuries” of normal attachment, exploration and learning, play, even sleeping and eating, take a back seat to hypervigilent attention to potential triggers and a readiness for defensive reactions.”