Trauma and Healing

By Marian MacCurdy
Associate professor of writing and coauthor of Writing and Healing

Delivered September 25, 2001

Many of us watched on TV as that second hijacked plane crashed into the second tower. Not only do we have the fact of the atrocity to absorb, but also we have the image of that plane playing over and over again in our minds, the same way the media broadcast it for nearly a week. If you find yourself having trouble removing that image from your minds, please know you are not alone. Nor does this mean that something is wrong with you. Indeed, it may mean that something is right with you, that you are responding in predictable ways to an unpredictable situation.

Trauma is most commonly defined as a normal response to an abnormal situation. Everything we have believed about safety in America was shattered on September 11. This is a monumental change for US citizens. And the picture of the plane crashing into the second tower has become an icon for this traumatic event. Traumatic images are encoded as emotions into our brains; if we are to use our related emotions constructively rather than allowing them to ambush us, we must understand how to access them.

While such traumatic images are noncognitive, and therefore not easily accessible, they have deep emotional presence. They pop up sometimes unbidden when we smell, hear, see, or touch something that takes us back to the time the traumatic event occurred. These images are hard to verbalize because they are locked into a part of the brain that is preverbal. This process is even chemical. Experiments show that when high levels of adrenaline and other stress hormones are circulating through the bloodstream, memory traces are deeply imprinted into the brain. We will remember the image of that plane crashing into the WTC 2 for the rest of our lives because it is burned into our midbrains. However, the image does not have to retain its original horrific quality. As painful as it is, eventually the immediate terror will fade, leaving behind a sadness that will remain with us forever. How does this process happen and how can we help it along?

We are hearing a lot about "healing" these days. The president has decreed that our national period of mourning is over and flags will no longer fly at half mast; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani asked New Yorkers to go return to their normal life patterns, Wall Street is open for business once again. We are supposed to "get past" the trauma, to jump-start our economy. Yet those who are closest to Ground Zero have said how hard it is to go into the financial district, to look up at the sky where the buildings once were, knowing that colleagues and friends perished on that site. Ithaca College lost alumni and others connected to us. Many of us knew someone who perished on September 11 or know someone who lost a relative. One financial firm, Cantor/Fitzgerald, lost close to 700 of its employees. A month or even a year will probably not be enough for many of these people to see their internal images without terror. What does that word "healing" mean in this context?

When a trauma first occurs, we are speechless, we have no words. The shock is so great, we simply stare and cannot take in the reality of what has just occurred. The closer we are to the trauma, the more intense the shock. Poet laureate Billy Collins, when asked on September 11 for his response, said, "Nothing, I can say nothing." Emily Dickinson knew this nothingness. As she wrote, "Pain has an element of blank. It cannot recollect when it began, or if there were a day when it was not." We cannot think. Our minds and emotions are anesthetized. Then with the passing of each hour, our bodies remind us that we need feeding; our minds begin to ask questions, and reach out to other minds; our hearts begin to bleed, and the tears come. At that time we turn to community --- to family, friends, and fellow citizens for support, love, assistance. We all saw and perhaps participated in the outpouring of help from firefighters, police, EMTs, doctors, blood donors, and those giving time, money, warm socks, and love and support for those aiding the recovery process. When we act, we defeat despair. When we lean on each other, we are all stronger. Action is the first defense against trauma. We saw this in a searingly dramatic way with the actions of those on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. They banded together to defeat the terrorists’ plan to crash the plane quite probably into the White House or the Capitol. They did not allow shock to render them helpless.

So, too, with the firefighters and police who went into the fatally damaged buildings to rescue others. We owe more than lives to those people. We also owe them our sense of stability, our sense that even in the most grievous danger we can act with honor. Appropriate action helps us mediate the long-term effects of trauma. Studies show that those who resist attacks are less likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Bessel van der Kolk, a researcher in the area of trauma, told a story about being held up one night in Boston. He resisted and has no lingering traumatic effects from the attack. I can also vouch for this process: Once when I was in college I was mugged by four teens looking for money. I somehow managed to resist them, and have had no recurrent fears from that incident. Please don’t assume from this, by the way, that I am urging resistance in every instance of attack. We know that can be dangerous, even fatal. It comes under the category of "don’t try this at home"; however, when we can resist relatively safely, our psyches do better. Even after a trauma has occurred, doing something constructive helps us all to integrate the event into our lives, which is the hallmark of healing from trauma.

As time passes after trauma, we begin to share our thoughts and feelings with each other as well as our actions. For centuries, poetry --- that intensely focused form --- has, in its beauty of language, helped give our grief an order. As Emily Dickinson wrote: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes/This is the hour of lead/Remembered, if outlived/As freezing persons recollect the snow/First --- chill --- then stupor --- then the letting go."

Ben Jonson’s poem written after the death of his young son is just as sharp with grief today as it was when it was written in 1616 and has provided the comfort of the commonality of loss for many: "Here doth lie/Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry."

Yet in spite of loss, most of us do learn to love and hope again. We do heal, perhaps with scars, but we do heal. What helps us to move past the images that are burned into our brains, the grief that makes love such a danger, the fears that made two of my students not want to sleep in their rooms on the 10th floor of Ithaca College’s West Tower the day after the attack?

Hundreds of people who recorded what they saw and experienced on September 11 have been sharing their fears and grief with thousands, maybe millions of other people by virtue of the Internet. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at Princeton, witnessed much of the destruction from the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood. He posted his written responses online and was soon receiving calls from the New Yorker and ABC news. As Tyson wrote: "All I could understand was that the written word somehow humanized what was going on. It’s easier to do if emotions are 90 percent of what are coursing through your mind. I was simultaneously emotionally charged and wounded."

And that, of course, is exactly a description of the effects of trauma: We are simultaneously emotionally charged and wounded, and writing begins the process of integrating those internal, preverbal wounds with the verbal parts of the brain, so we can access them to get them outside of us and to the world. By talking and writing we begin to create a community with others. Through our writing, we begin to feel less isolated by the trauma, and therefore less helpless, and so we begin, ever so slowly, to heal.

We must remember, however, that everyone heals at a different rate and in a somewhat different way. The person sitting to the left of you might have lost someone close to her; the person on the right might have witnessed the attack. We need to be utterly respectful of our differences as well as note the similarities of our grief. Remember, too, that in spite of the desire on the part of our national leaders to urge us to "get back to normal," we will never be the same again. Our lives, our psyches, can never wipe out what happened. But we can integrate it into the rest of our existence and go on, as these writers are attempting to do, by sharing their stories with the world.

As you might expect, one of the most significant actions that can provide integrated healing is to ensure that this trauma is never repeated. This is why so many survivors of sexual abuse, or families of victims of drunk drivers, and other survivors take their stories to the world. They want to make some good use of their experience; to ensure that what happened to them will never happen to anyone else. In the case of the atrocities of September 11, we need to think very carefully about the difference between justice and revenge. When we are hurting, we want to lash out, act in some way to inflict pain on our enemies. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to more senseless pain. We have seen the acts of a few in this country who seek to blame all those of Arab descent for these attacks. This is, of course, not justice. It is revenge on the innocent who are guilty only by association, not by deed. This makes us as vicious as the perpetrators. And the cycle of violence continues.

One of the primary theoretical tenets of the post–modern 21st century is the belief that all knowledge exists within a context; that is, everything I am saying to you tonight has grown from my past, my experiences, and my world view created from my past. There are no a priori truths that we all agree on, only those that we negotiate, given our time frame, backgrounds, and belief systems. I got a clear dose of this watching The Week in Review on PBS last Sunday. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Middle East correspondent, was interviewed. He had been in Egypt speaking with citizens there about this tragedy. These were educated people, and they were confused. They didn’t know why this attack was such a monumental tragedy for the U.S. Mr. Friedman tried to explain by attempting to create empathy: "Someone just blew up the equivalent of our pyramids, the symbol of our way of life." The particular Egyptians he spoke with see the attacks as simply an extension of bombings in the Middle East --- Palestine and Kuwait --- and therefore have little empathy for us because their lives are contained within a totally different context, one of perennial discord with their neighbors. They manifest Lily Tomlin’s joke, "We are all in this boat alone."

We, however, cannot afford to echo this thought. If we see the entire Muslim world as our enemies we will be perpetuating the very pain we are trying to prevent.

This basic tenet of post–modernism, that no subject can be discussed outside its context, has made the personal part of the political world. Rather than seeing personal stories as simply confessional, we see that knowledge is mediated by its source. When we share our contexts we allow others to define for themselves the extent of our credibility. In order to allow you to know the context for my comments about trauma and healing, justice and revenge, I will share with you how I have come to my perspectives.

I am Armenian on both sides of my family. All four of my grandparents survived the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century, my maternal grandmother hiding on a roof from the Turks when she was four and loading rifles when she was 17, and my paternal grandmother running to the American mission with her baby in arms. Her hair turned white overnight when she was 22, trying to protect her child from the Turks. At the end of World War I the perpetrators of the genocide were tried in a court of law and convicted, but they were allowed to escape with their millions. No international war tribunals like those at Nuremberg existed, so the criminals were free. My grandfather served as the treasurer of a secret three–person committee whose task was to assassinate the architects of the Armenian Genocide, which they did. Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, who was one of the masterminds of this genocide, was killed in Berlin in 1921. The assassin was tried and acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide since Talaat’s orders had wiped out the assassin’s entire family. I knew my grandfather as a gentle soul whose only sign of anger was a furrowed brow and tense fingers squeezing my arm. Though the assassinations could be seen as vigilante justice, my grandfather’s participation in these actions was the only way he thought he could act honorably in a dishonorable situation. He saw himself as an agent of justice when he helped organize the assassinations of Turkish leaders that were living the high life in post–war Berlin.

I also have in my family another man who took the law into his own hands. One side of my family escaped the genocide by heading south into Beirut. In the early 80s Israel was bombing Beirut to destroy those who led incursions into Israel from Lebanon. Once again, Armenians were seeing their homes destroyed, their lives ruined by violence. One young man, the son of a second cousin, became friendly with Palestinian radicals and learned their terrorist ways. His anger at the injustice done to the Armenians––the Turks have never admitted the genocide they perpetrated–– grew unchecked. He was living in a city that became rubble, saw his Palestinian friends rendered homeless and his own family nearly defeated by the violence. This was also during a time when radical Armenian elements were attempting to vent their fury on the Turks who denied the Genocide by bombing Turkish officials. One day in a small room in Switzerland, where my relative was attending college, he tried to build a bomb. In the process he blinded himself and blew off all the fingers of one hand. He is now a pacifist. Some people do learn, but at a high price.

I tell you these stories to show you the difference for me between justice and revenge. I can understand my grandfather’s choice to assassinate the architects of the Armenian Genocide when the world powers he looked to for justice freed the convicted murderers of one and a half million innocent people. It was akin to the Jews finding Eichmann and executing him. But bombing an innocent Turkish official who lived 70 years after the Genocide is only murderous revenge. In the early 80s a few Armenians turned to terrorism. At that time my uncle was a colonel in the Air Force, based in Turkey. One of the Armenian terrorist actions killed a military official he knew. My uncle, an Armenian–American Air Force colonel in the land that almost exterminated his people, said sadly, "He was my friend."

When we take out our anger and fear on innocent people, we are no better than the perpetrators. Let’s remember --- the attack on the WTC was an international tragedy. These terrorists did not discriminate among the British, the French, the Japanese, even the Muslims who were in that building.

But we must discriminate. Remember what I said a few minutes ago. We are all hurting, but some are closer to Ground Zero than others. Appropriate action and empathy for each other, for all those affected by this tragedy, will help us heal. Grief is natural. We will mourn for a long time. But despair and hate do not have to overtake us. If we reach out to others we grow in strength.

Artists know that pain can be transmuted through their art. Picasso’s Guernica, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry reminds us that grief is inevitable but can lead to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

In a section of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou writes of a moment in her graduation from public school when their accomplishments meant nothing, when the white monolith appeared too heavy to move. The valedictorian of her high school began singing what in 1940 was called the Negro National Anthem:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

After the entire audience spontaneously sang this song, Angelou then records: "We were on top again. As always, again. We survived."

In our grief we come together; in our pain we see each other; in our reach for justice we join with the larger world. We can do no more and no less.