Never Again! Trauma Disrupts the Experience of Time

I use the term portkey, which I borrowed from Harry Potter, to capture the profound impact of emotional trauma on our experience of time (Stolorow, 2007). Harry was a severely traumatized little boy, nearly killed by his parents’ murderer and left in the care of a family that mistreated him cruelly. He arose from the ashes of devastating trauma as a wizard in possession of wondrous magical powers, and yet never free from the original trauma, always under threat by his parents’ murderer. As a wizard, he encountered portkeys—objects that transported him instantly to other places, obliterating the duration ordinarily required for travel from one location to another. Portkeys to trauma return us again and again to an experience of traumatization. The experience of such portkeys fractures, and can even obliterate, our sense of unitary selfhood, of being continuous in time.

Trauma devastatingly disrupts the ordinary linearity and unity of our experience of time (Stolorow, 2011), our sense of stretching-along from the past to an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which we remain forever trapped, or to which we are condemned to be perpetually returned, through the portkeys supplied by life's slings and arrows. In the region of trauma all duration or stretching-along collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Trauma, in other words, is timeless (Stolorow, 2003). Further, because trauma so profoundly modifies our ordinary experience of time, the traumatized person quite literally lives in another kind of reality, completely different from the one that others inhabit. This felt differentness in turn, contributes to the sense of alienation and estrangement from other human beings that typically haunts the traumatized person (Stolorow, 1999).