On trauma

Night, by Elie Wiesel, was one of the most horrendous texts I read for school. The education board must have wanted to sort the wheat from the chaff that year, because as well as Night they subjected us to All Quiet on the Western Front. If you hadn't wanted to burn something down after the first book, you did by the close of the second.

The thing that struck me about these stories was how anyone could get past the experience of war, of a massive, surreal, ongoing trauma like that, and continue to build themselves a life afterward.

The problem with trauma is that it expands your understanding of what's possible in the world in horrible directions. It makes the unconscionable real. And this makes it difficult to reconcile the experience with whatever comes after—however calm or pretty or peaceful it may be.

There is a myth that children are more resilient about such things, but it really comes down to the individual. I like to think it would be easier to overcome trauma as an adult, but I know this isn't true. Similarly, if the first years of a life are spent in trauma, the "normal" world forever after can seem alien, like a movie set or a painting into which one has somehow strayed. It seems so real, yet it jars so strongly with the first truths we knew about ourselves and the world—truths that are as ingrained as how we hold a fork or recite the alphabet.

How can one make sense of worlds, realities, at complete odds? How can both be true? Inevitably we apply coping mechanisms from one world to the other, with disastrous results. Inevitably.

Perhaps this is why so many victims of trauma fail to achieve a post-traumatic world that is calm or peaceful or pretty. For some, it must be easier to reconcile trauma with a post-traumatic reality by perpetuating it. This mightn't be a conscious choice, but one that naturally precipitates from the expectations set by the trauma and the fact that, until someone tells or shows you otherwise, it's pretty much all you know.

Your expectations draw you down those same dark paths, to the hard ground you know better than any other. Perhaps that's where you feel the greatest sense of belonging. Perhaps that's where things make the most sense, where you make the most sense.

This is what trauma does to people.