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The names for things don't come first, words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
—Tom Stoppard, “The Coast of Utopia” Part II, , p. 6
Words just don't cut it.
—Patient quoted by
We increasingly realize that emotions begin in bodily sensation and are named in the prefrontal neo-cortex. And that therefore, as the playwright observes, there are pervasive limitations of languaging. Watching the roundtable DVD, I am particularly mindful of this. How to comment on what was said at the roundtable? Because trauma is lodged in the senses, musculature and maybe even cells (Pert, 1999), and the memories of it are lodged in non-verbal areas of the brain, it has been observed that our language for trauma is terribly inadequate. Words can both honor, as well as minimize, the degree of suffering. Verbal nuances can feel empathic or they can seem to highlight the distance between the speaker and spoken-about.
I knew that male Jewish children were more identifiable due to circumcision, but what to say when this was related matter-of-factly by Clem? How to say anything about Sophia's father, the demonizingly labeled “wolf in the attic?” And what if, as has been argued, one of trauma treatment's most important functions is unobtrusive witnessing? I can demonstrate that I have been a witness via my remarks. But am I moving out of the witness position by speaking, by writing this?
The roundtable was also an unusual format, as I found myself neither reading a paper, nor watching and hearing from the usual conference