The Trauma of Hell

Our focus today was on the interplay and similarities between Rambo’s conception of Holy Saturday and the experience of reliving a traumatic experience as described by van der Kolk. Working together to create a theology of Holy Saturday, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr wrote about the place where “words fall silent,” where the difference between death and life becomes ambiguous. Into this space steps the witness of trauma, whose job it is to acknowledge what has been lost and what remains. Describing the witness, Rambo writes, “a witness stands in the space of death, surrounded by darkness thicker than she has ever known.” Within therapeutic spaces, the witness is often the therapist, who stands with the client in the breach. It is this ability to act as an emotionally present witness that offers the client hope.

At the heart of trauma, there is often a fundamental level of isolation and dissociation, where the past and present blur together. Narrative ability breaks down and is replaced with a kind of emptiness and relational abandonment. Nancy, one of van der Kolk’s traumatized clients, likens this state to an “empty numbness.” When reliving her traumatic surgery, Nancy felt “isolated from all humanity, profoundly alone in spite of the people surrounding [her].” This description is very similar to Speyr’s somatic and supernatural identification with Christ in hell, where “the pain of hell meant that [Speyr] was completely cut off from all forms of relationship.” “The uniqueness of Holy Saturday,” writes Rambo, “lies in the finality of its disconnection. One does not take on suffering in hell; one endures what it is to be abandoned.” From this vivid description, it clear that what traumatized individuals are really experiencing in their isolation is a taste of hell.