Burdening the Listener
As if being the victim of a horrific trauma isn’t difficult enough, survivors must worry about how the testimony of their experiences will affect others. After a few preliminary attempts to discuss their lives and their histories honestly with others, survivors learn very quickly that trauma can just not be “unloaded” on anyone. Why? One childhood incest survivor explains: Every time I tried to talk to my mom about the incest, I could just see her gloss over, like she had to put on a crash helmet mentally. She always seemed to have about a two-minute time limit before she changed the subject or asked me, “Why don’t you just forget about this? Why do you talk and think about it so much?” Any attempts to explain why incest couldn’t just be forgotten always ended up with the same reply from her. She just wanted me to slap a smile on and pretend it never happened… not so much because I was hurting but because it was clearly too painful for her to hear about. We stayed in a hotel together once when I was going through a bad spell of nightmares and flashbacks. I told her I needed to sleep with the light on. She said she couldn’t get any sleep like that, but that I could keep the bathroom light on. Five minutes after she turned the light off, I was screaming and thrashing around. It finally clicked for her that I wasn’t just doing this for attention-that maybe I talked about the incest because it was really eating at me, because it was deeply affecting me.Types of Listeners
In a fascinating article by Dr. Dori Laub called “Bearing Witness,” she profiles this phenomenon with Holocaust survivors. As you can imagine, Holocaust survivors, like all trauma victims, needed to be able to talk openly about their lives, but other people seemed to become traumatized themselves just hearing these second-hand stories. Dr. Laub categorized the coping strategies of the listeners:- Paralysis – listeners just clam up completely not knowing what to do or say
- Outrage – listeners blow up in anger upon hearing the trauma and often “dump” their anger on the victims
- Apathy – listeners who simply are not able to process such horror may just shut down their emotions completely in order to “survive” hearing about the trauma
- Admiration – listeners might put the victim on a pedestal upon hearing their testimony as if they are a big screen protagonist or a superhero: “Wow! You survived all that! How did you do it? You’re amazing.”
- Interviewing – listeners adopt this research and fact-finding strategy by asking the victim question after question, which allows them to bypass the feeling part of listening and bury it with details
- Empathy – listeners might cry right along with the victim as he or she talks not because they are particularly compassionate or concerned but because they are overwhelmed
