A person experiencing trauma is plagued with terrifying thoughts and strong, painful feelings such as fear or helplessness, but often feels shame about these feelings and suffers in silence. He or she may withdraw, detach, become irritable, unable to concentrate, suffer from sleep disturbance, become aggressive, and may experience flashbacks. In Trauma and Recovery: from Domestic Violence to Political Terror (1992), Judith Herman, MD, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, explains that during a traumatic event the linguistic encoding of memory is deactivated, causing the central nervous system to revert to sensory forms of memory. The body reacts to these stimuli as if there is a continuing threat, and the trauma survivor may overreact or seem to shut down. He or she may avoid situations that evoke thoughts and feelings reminiscent of the trauma, or experience emotional numbing in both trauma-related situations and in everyday life.

Research reported in Psychiatric Times  (March, 1977) by Bessell van der Kolk, M.D., an internationally recognized leader in the field of trauma, indicates that complete or partial amnesia occurs after virtually every form of traumatic experience, with childhood sexual abuse, witnessing a murder of a family member, and combat exposure yielding the highest rates.  Memories typically emerge during exposure to sensory or feeling stimuli that match elements associated with the trauma.  It's also common for a trauma survivor to suffer a combination of vivid recall for some elements associated with the trauma, and amnesia for others.  Reactions to trauma fade over time for many, and they seem to experience fairly good adjustment throughout their lives except that they typically don't react to stress the way others do, but instead, often feel or act as if they're being traumatized all over again.

Experts believe that the more direct a person's exposure to a traumatic event is, the more likely it is that the after effects will be intense.  But second-hand exposure can also be taumatizing, as it was for many of us on September 11, 2001, as we watched instant replays of terrorist-driven planes fly into the World Trade Center on our TV's, and became paralyzed with shock, grief, anxiety, and fear. Over the past several weeks some of us have experienced similar reactions in response to images of the suffering pelicans and birds immersed in the hot oil of the Gulf, or panoramic views of dead birds floating in it.

In Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed; How We Can Heal (2003), Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, explains that none of us can avoid witnessing violence, whether in nature or in relationships, and we need to be aware of both the toxic power of this witnessing and its tremendous healing potential.  Compassionate witnessing, which contributes to the transformation of violence on every level from the individual to the societal, requires that we take time for reflection and self-care. We need a community of support in our personal lives so that we can process the meaningfulness of our own experiences as victims and witnesses.  This enables us to develop a capacity for empathic listening, and insures that our compassion extends from an open heart, rather than an overwhelmed one. When we do the important work of bearing witness, we dissolve the anguishing wall of isolation between the victim and society, and create a bridge of emotional connection, thereby lessening the impact of trauma.

A continual task in the process of healing from trauma is that of assigning language to experience.  This is one reason why psychotherapy promotes healing. Each time we tell our story it lessens the power it has over us. Transformed, the trauma story shifts.  Shame and fear are erased by dignity, wisdom, and peace. As one sexual abuse survivor told me, "keeping the secret only keeps in the shame." But regardless of what the trauma experience is, the act of telling one's story also has its own set of problems, which are rarely easy to resolve, but always important to address. We're often rewarded for keeping silent, or for denying or displacing our feelings, and punished for speaking the truth.  In domestic violence situations this can feel like, and in some cases actually be, a choice between life and death. In other family relationships and in friendships, it presents the trauma survivor with a painful dilemma, eloquently described by Kaethe Weingarten in Witnessing, Wonder, and Hope (Family Process, Winter, 2000):

"If I don't tell you what I really think and feel, I will feel disconnected from you.  But, if I do tell you what I really think and feel, you will withdraw from me.  What I have to say is so heinous, horrible, toxic, unacceptable, that you will be unable to stand me."

This dilemma contributes to creating a "conspiracy of silence" that far too often follows trauma, and is profoundly destructive, because it attests to the person's, family's, society's, community's and nation's inability to integrate the trauma. When there is no meaningful dialogue exchanged, fear, confusion, isolation, sadness, anger, shame, and blame can prevail and are transmitted to the next generations. This is in sharp contrast to widespread research findings that social support is the most important factor in coping with traumatic stress. (Danieli, Yael, International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, 1998). There certainly are ways in which the media is helpful in this process.  Larry King's telethon last night about the Gulf Oil Disaster and how we can help, is a good example of that, as is the legacy of the Oprah Winfrey Show's impact in raising awareness of many issues, but right now I'm thinking of her powerful, healing impact on victims of domestic violence. And the "In Memoriam" segment at the end of  ABC's Sunday monring show, This Week, is nothing less than a prayerful ritual of grief for my husband and I.

Children are helpless bystanders to all kinds of trauma, and powerless witnesses of their parents' emotional turmoil. Take the trauma of war for example.  Even if a child is not directly related to war through the experience of an immediate relative having been deployed, she or he still hears about war and struggles to understand what it means and what is implied in the atmosphere of anxiety and fear surrounding it.  What children need most from us is for us to be attuned to them, so that we can teach them.