For this week’s reading pod selection we read “Trapped In Relationships: The Cost of Abuse and Neglect” in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Our group discussed many of the tensions we felt reading this chapter and also our struggles relating it to spirituality and a womanist perspective.
We began by addressing that God is our Father and our Mother; therefore, we were trying to engage this chapter of trauma as we think about our ultimate caregiver. God is our ultimate provider, but if we do not have an earthly provider that gives an attuned face, how can we trust God to be an attuned face? How does one move towards God if they are terrified to trust anyone? Trusting God also seems more difficult because He is not physically present; therefore, how do traumatized people get to God after they have been violated? Traumatized people can lack the ability to name what has harmed relationship, including relationship with God. van der Kolk mentioned how studies have displayed that the bodies of incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety. The past is impressed not only in their minds but also on the core of their beings, in the safety of their bodies.
Furthermore, from a womanist perspective, this chapter made us think of how Jesus encountered women and how women encountered Jesus. In our culture specifically, women are taught to exile parts of themselves, the idea that it is a man’s world or a particular kind of woman’s world. This brought up the self-masks of feminism and the feminist side of God. The traumatic parts of the female perversions that come from hating your body, liking it too much, or envying others. One thing we did notice is that with womanist writers, they know their bodies and there is something embodied with the womanist perspective that shows richness in bringing your whole body to a spiritual experience.
Our group also discussed this quote, by Stephen Cope, at the opening of this chapter,
“The night sea journey is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of unconsciousness. The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.”
This reminded us of Freud’s work which displayed a commitment to honesty. When we get to speak honestly we have the ability to not exile parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily want, but let them be there. It is way easier to look at parts of ourselves and say, “that’s not me,” than it is to embrace every part of who we are. The truth is an implemental process, the more freedom and non-judgment, the more you actually want to disclose. For our own trauma stories, it is easy to dissociate enough to remove our heart and mind from our experience and continue to remember the particularity of who we think we are. This chapter was really impactful and we walked away realizing that this is just the beginning in terms of sitting with someone who has experienced trauma.
