Joanna Doane:
"In this article I've pieced together, I'm a bit anxious.  Because the thinking is too black and white. It accounts an interesting and respectable hypothesis, but its not "fool proof".   In this woman's detective work, she could unknowingly conclude things that just aren't accurate - things that can effect a child...how they see themselves, and their lives.  I believe the unconscious holds everything we don't or can't process.  But, theres something about the guessing game approach that worries me.  Was I, myself, hurt in my past?  Yes.  Do I have recovered memories of this?  Yes.  Will I ever know if every memory is accurate?  No.  Can I trust that they all are?  No. 

I went through painful experiences that I do have to process.  Ones that I have processed.  Some were real because I've always remebered them, but never allowed myself to think about them until years after they occured.  There are some that are questionable because there will never be a way to proof whether or not it did or didn't happen.  I've never been hypnotized.  Thats the part I don't agree with.  Hynosis is dangerous to me.  Incredibly dangerous. I believe you can gain insite from dreams.  Thats been proven and I agree with it.  But, I don't agree that a person under hypnosis (a dream-like state) is able to control the line between their memories and between their imaginations.  Like scary dreams that you wake up from and realize they weren't real."

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THE UNSAYABLE

THE UNSAYABLE

The Hidden Language of Trauma.

By Annie G. Rogers.

Review by KATHRYN HARRISON

Annie G Rodgers describes her own childhood as being shattering.  At the age of 16 she stopped speaking all together as a result.  Eventually she recovered; she spoke; she grew up and became a Harvard University professor and a clinical psychologist who treated abused and abandoned children, fulfilling the vocation that, when she was a teenager, landed her in a mental institution.  “The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma” is an account of Rogers’s successes, as well as her frustrations, in helping girls, herself included, hear the stories of their pasts and discover the truths of their essential selves - truths, that she believes, surface no matter how forcefully they are repressed.

 One type of psychoanalytic thought, termed as being Lacanian, explains a theory that human beings are “born into language,” and that as we acquire language we discover loss. Our preverbal selves are one with an all-providing mother who anticipates needs we cannot give voice to; our verbal selves have separated, enough that we are conscious of that separation. Necessarily, we are traumatized by what separation means: that we must rely on language to express our demands and thus risk being misunderstood. It is equally risky to be understood too well, and in order to get the affirmation we crave from mother, we repress or censor what we imagine she won’t like.  Rodgers writes that to grow up and become fully human is traumatic. That, whether we recognize it or not, each of us is poised between two existential terrors, that of remaining unknown and unseen, our anguish and our joys without witness, and that of being known so completely that we are left undefended.

Such ideas offered Rogers “a structure for listening” to her patients so as to help them understand themselves and transcend symptoms more commonly treated with cognitive-behavioral therapies developed for post-traumatic stress disorder. In Lancanian analyticism “the unconscious is structured like a language” was the epiphany — the light-bulb moment — she needed to begin to untangle the puzzles of symptoms, actions and statements that characterized the abused children she worked with, many of whom were considered too sick or damaged to be helped.

In recounting her treatment of an 11-year-old girl who suffered debilitating headaches and anxiety in the wake of being abused by a neighbor, Rogers outlines a process of listening for words or even parts of words the girl repeated during therapy, remarking how motifs from her dreams connected to her waking life, and remaining alert to any physical symptoms, in this case the headaches. After sessions, Rogers took notes, and she ruminated on what she’d heard. Like a good detective, she acted on a hunch as well as evidence when she asked the child if headaches might not be code for Ed aches, a way of “telling by not telling” that the neighbor, whose name was Ed, had hurt her.

The psycho analyst is as much a detective as also a listener, piecing together a code that emerges from language, symptoms and actions. “Although unconscious life is anything but random, its logic isn’t always clear” but it can be deciphered “through associations and in retrospect.”  Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.

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Joanna Doane:
"Once again, this is interesting, but is it fact?  Unprocessed abuse can definitely lead to severe physical symptoms.  In my eyes its save to assume that the headaches are possibly connected to the abuse the child endured, but to go as far as declaring them to be "Ed-aches" to me is crossing a line.  She could be right.  But she could also be wrong.  I do have psychosomatic symptoms off and on, but I view it as either the mind's effort to process the trauma that the symptoms stem from, or that the stress involved with the therapy is causing the physiological symptoms.  So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I believe to a certain extent what this woman is saying, but not to the extent of which shes saying it."

 
-- Joanna M. Doane

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