PTSD Healing Thought of the Day: Turning our Focus Away From Trauma
Thursday, June 25th, 2009 • PTSD Healing Thought of the Week •
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Judith Lewis Herman writes,
The survivor may wonder how she can possibly give her due respect to the horror she has endured if she no longer devotes her life to remembrance and warning.
We have given our due respect. We have suffered long enough. We have honored our trauma and ourselves as survivors. It’s time to do something else.
Our lives are about so much more than remembrance and warning. Who we are is so much more than just our trauma. Who we can be is our choice now the trauma has passed.
What’s the point of surviving if we don’t really live afterward?
(Photo: .sweetcaroline)
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“We have given our due respect. We have suffered long enough. We have honored our trauma and ourselves as survivors. It’s time to do something else.”
I think you have hit the nail on the head here. I have enjoyed my wanderings through your blog and I can not say how glad I am that it exists. So many people get lost in their victim hood and years can be wasted in looping around and around.
Thanks for your visit and your comment on my blog. you described the identity crisis very well and sen me on a new tack. I love it when someone makes me think. That makes me grow. Thank you
“I survived” locks us into the past. It’s not even true. None of us are the same people we were before so we could just as easily say “I did not survive”.
“I survived” is like “I was born”. It totally ignores “and now what do I want to do”.
Tom Hanks (Shipwrecked) could have spared as a long movie by just saying “I survived” and sitting on the beach and dying of thirst. All the while saying “I survived”.
@Zareba – Isn’t that the fun of our collective voices — the new ideas that we illuminate for each other? So glad you stopped by. Look forward to hearing more from you in the future!
@Mike – All identity theory and philosophy rests on some quality of sameness that exists in a thing over time. ‘I’ indicates an entity that endures over time. As long as the ‘I’ exists then some part of the I survived. Lacking some quality of sameness does not mean we did not survive. It means we have changed, or parts of us are no longer the same. It does not mean the entity ‘I’ itself did not endure.
Acknowledging who we are is critical to making choices about who we want to be. We must say, “I survived” so that we can say, ‘Today I am…” As long as we have memory we are, as you say, locked into the past. The question is, Do we find our motivation there? Do we allow the past to determine our present and inform our future? I say, No.
Still, we are the sum total of our experiences. Memory informs identity. We cannot escape the culmination of all we have seen and known; we can escape allowing those things to rule us in negative ways.
‘I survived’ doesn’t ignore but is the precursor to “and now what do I want to do?” Survivors know more than anyone that choices have to be made, that we must be the arbiters of our own existence and if we do not ask that question and force ourselves to find an answer fate will make the choices for us.