Trauma And Ignorance

WE SEE THE SYMPTOMATIC EFFECTS OF TRAUMA in an intriguing form of memory: not knowing. Not knowing is often the first response to trauma. It reflects the moment of breakdown, the sudden confusion of impact, of being overwhelmed by the stunning shock where everything adaptive fails, except for the obliteration of knowledge

As Laub and Auerhahn (1993) observe, it is the nature of trauma to elude knowledge. Perhaps it is also the self-protective function of knowledge to elude trauma. Ignorance in the presence of anguish is often the signature of trauma. To survive it, the knowledge of trauma needs to be deflected, hidden, disconnected from ordinary experiential knowledge Thinking about something that is so overwhelming that it cannot be thought about is something of an impossibility.

Trauma is overwhelming. Virtually nothing that is known by the victim can prepare for it, and nothing that the victim does can avoid it. It must be endured against the wishes of the victim, without self-protection or the protection of another person upon whom the victim has depended. Among the most powerful effects of trauma, is the intrusive disruption of conscious and unconscious thinking. As a result, trauma cannot be symbolically represented. When conscious and unconscious processes are disrupted, the skills that they have come to build—meaning, cognitive structure, sign recognition, symbol formation, syntax, differentiation, discrimination, and the availability to use these capacities to formulate and organize language—are either absent or are present but ineffectual. It appears that the need to save or preserve the self involves the abrupt disconnection of self from its capacities to perceive, think, and feel coherently. Descriptively, this is dissociation.

Helplessness is among the common elements of trauma. It is a failure in self-protection. Because of the stunning disruption of thinking, as well as the helplessness, the subsequent perception of trauma by the victim is