Loss of Language (LOL)

Blogpost #3

by w/ Kaitlin Bryant, Tylor Lovins, Taylor Burch, Brooks Page & Karlie Gibson

Loss of Faith as Loss of Language

The loss of language in trauma appears to be the linguistic equivalent to the loss of breath in the body. The fight, flight, or freeze response activated in the reliving of traumatic experiences that the body holds makes breath scarce, and at the same time language festers. The Breath of God, also known as God’s Spirit, feels absent, as the post traumatic world is like a wasteland of empty frames. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere is abundant. Nothing is good. The body, standing on a continent, is also somehow in free fall.

Language illuminates. When it is connected to experience, and not identified with it, it holds the past in the present or it brings the future to bear on all that is in the moment. But in trauma the body becomes like a black box. It’s all exteriority. Language no longer illuminates or holds, it is a coal car, moving along the tracks of trauma, just as opaque and heavy as the experiences themselves. Just as there is no subject positioned outside the experience of trauma in the reliving of it, language loses its symbolic function and is reduced to an arrangement of the trauma itself.

This is why Annie Roger’s idea about treating someone experiencing psychosis as someone who is trying to speak is so important.¹ Just as in psychosis, the symbolic nature of language is lost in trauma. To therefore not treat the language itself as irretrievable and to ask questions and name and dialogue with the person who has lost language helps reinstate the two-fold nature of the symbolic. By doing so, the speaker can once again stand outside of the past, in the present, and point to something as separate from themselves.

The loss of language is in part so difficult to bear because what one experiences or feels thereafter becomes identical with the self. To reinstate language allows for a separation once again. “As God in the scene of hurt is a bodiless voice, so men and women are voiceless bodies. God is their voice; they have none separate from him. Repeatedly, any capacity for self-transformation into a separate verbal or material form is shattered, as God shatters the building of the tower of Babel by shattering the language of the workers into multiple and mutually uncomprehending tongues (Genesis 11:1–9).”²

Among other things, Jamie Lee Finch is a embodiment coach, poet, and self professed sex witch. In her book regarding Religious Trauma Syndrome that focuses on those individuals exiting the evangelical movement, she adds to a chorus of voices that move us through our traumatic experiences into a place of language. “Marlene Winell outlines the recovery phases for those healing from Religious Trauma Syndrome as separation, confusion, avoidance, feeling, and rebuilding. This list mirrors Peter Levine’s outline for healing from other forms of trauma: Leaving the environment, establishing safety, and releasing emotions…The initial separation phase looks different for everyone, but to paraphrase what Richard Rohr refers to as catalysts for all enlightenment, separation almost always comes on the heels or either great love or great suffering.”³ It doesn’t seem too far of a stretch to name these great loves, or even sufferings, as witnesses. But to move into a space for language requires that these preliminary spaces be held by something or someone.

Endnotes:

1. Annie Rogers, Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language (Routledge, 2016), 43.
2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), 200.
3. Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: a Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity (Self published, 2019), 93.