Trauma – 3

I have been searching for explanations of the differences in our reactions. One of the reasons may be that I have no experience with trauma therapy. My first therapy was based on TA (transactional analysis), which says that we do make decisions (subconsciously) as children about ourselves and the world. They determine or at least strongly colour our “life scripts”. Such “decisions” can be: I am not really lovable; it was my fault that father left the family; only if I work hard will I be accepted. TA also says that these “decisions” can be changed, even late in life. (See the wonderful book by Mary McClure Goulding/Robert L. Goulding, Changing Lives Through Redecision Therapy, New York 1997)

Well, even in TA theory you cannot just move from one stage to the other at liberty, and certainly not if you have been seriously traumatized. So I agree that the statement by Mr. Aghazarian may look naïve and perhaps even frivolous. A lot depends on how we conceptualize trauma and whether we talk about individuals or whole societies, though. Maybe we should distinguish between genuine trauma, wounds (of course, trauma also means wound originally), or burdens. (This is my personal, not scholarly language.)

A couple of months ago I read Tilman Moser’s recent psychological autobiography. (Moser is one of Germany’s most famous psychotherapists.) In this book with the title Bekenntnisse einer halb-geheilten Seele (confessions from a half-cured soul) he analyzes his own long journey through half a dozen therapies, until he finally adjusted to the fact that his situation had improved but that he will never fully recover from a series of traumatic events, beginning with his turbulent birth.

Currently I am reading the second volume of Ulla Hahn’s large autobiographical novel Aufbruch (departure or awakening). (Ulla Hahn is one of Germany’s foremost poets and writers.) She was raped when she was 17, and she at length describes the terrible distortions which this experience created in her life. It is a deeply disturbing story which I would recommend to anybody who wanted to read something about post-traumatic stress syndrome in non-scientific literary language.

I am not sure I ever experienced an event or a phase which I could call traumatic. My recurring somatoform depressions, which I only feel in my body (apart from the physical pain I am almost perfectly normal), may or may not go back to the time in my mother’s womb and to the strains of her pregnancy in 1944/1945. She would always tell herself: “I mustn’t get excited, I am expecting a baby”– an impossible injunction at a time of real threats to her life.

I have learned to live with my symptoms and to enjoy myself nevertheless. I cannot do much about them anyway. I have had much more control (or could do more “redecision-making”) about the “wounds” in my life, such as my parents’ divorce or my first child’s birth and death.

Sonja’s birth was indeed traumatic (for her). As a result of medical maltreatment almost all of her brain was destroyed, and she died when she was 18 months old. I made the “decision” at the time that I would not show my sadness and desperation, because I wanted to protect my wife, who was desperate enough herself. Later we found out that this had been the wrong decision. Irene was deeply irritated about my outward calmness and for some time even thought of leaving me.

28 years after Sonja’s death, when I was in a psychosomatic clinic after my “burn-out”, I had an unexpected flashback in the first go-around and the tears came again. I joined a “mourning group”, and after a couple of sessions, a symbolical stoning of the doctor who had ruined Sonja’s life, and a long fictitious letter to my first daughter, which I read out in the group and later dropped into the local river to let it flow, I could finally say good-by to her. She is deep in my heart, but there is no wound left, only a major scar. (There are some connections to the Nazi past here, which I will address some other time.)

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