Trauma & Art

 ‘The body keeps the score’, Bessel van der Kolk

Short extracts from material I had written in 2012 (Tonya Alexandri, October 26th, 2015)

‘Also, survivors have been silenced through fear, threats and manipulation to remain silent. Silencing procedures may have involved verbal and physical threats to their own safety or the safety of their family. However, keeping traumatic experience suppressed requires tremendous effort and energy, which comes at a high price because ‘the energy of the original trauma remains in the body like an electrical storm that reverberates tension throughout the biological system’ (Bradshaw, 1990), and ultimately this undischarged energy takes its toll on survivors lives. Levine and his colleagues claim that trauma is not an event, but it is in the nervous system because ‘in trauma the mind becomes profoundly altered’ leaving undischarged survival energy in the body. In other words, it remains in the body and it is in the effect of the event and until these natural responses to trauma and threat are discharged or completed they will remain symptomatic (Levine and Frederick, 1997; Levine and Kline, 2007).

‘Child abuse, torture and other forms of violations do not occur in a vacuum, but within an excessively competitive culture that condones violence and exploitation of others, and as long as we continue to condone these practices, desecrate, exploit and violate our children and others we will all be wounded and we will all need healing.  Trauma will be passed on from one generation to another affecting us all at some level because we are all in the end inextricably and dynamically interrelated. Levine and Frederick claim that trauma can be self-perpetuating, crossing generations in families, communities and countries until we take steps to contain its propagation (Levine and Frederick, 1997). Finally, concerning our inseparability and interconnectedness, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King wrote ‘in a real sense all life is inter-related….all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I am ought to be’.

Bradshaw, J. (1992) Homecoming, Bantam Books, New York

Levine, P. and Frederick, A. (1997) Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, North Atlantic Books, the USA

Levine, P. and Kline, M. (2007) Trauma τhrough a Child’s Eyes, North Atlantic Books, the USA