PTSD and Liberation
This week in our Liberation Theology Reading Pod, we discussed chapter 12 in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. The title of the chapter itself says volumes about the content we discussed: “The Unbearable Heaviness of Remembering.” Through the chapter, van der Kolk explains the somatic nature of trauma, and how, even when the mind has forgotten the trauma, the body has not forgotten.
van der Kolk offers a history of PTSD (first named “shell shock” in WWI) and juxtaposes WWI veterans’ somatic PTSD symptoms with WWII’s veterans’ experiences of PTSD. As with most mental illnesses, PTSD has fought hard against societal stigma. Many opposed its validity, marking veterans’ somatic and psychological symptoms as character defects, despite well-observed evidence for the mass effects of war trauma.
We discussed the cultural effects of trauma that van der Kolk highlights betwen WWI and WWII veterans. In WWII, veterans with PTSD were treated with hypnotherapy. van der Kolk mentions that WWII veterans are better able to articulate the stories of their traumas, while the WWI veterans experience their trauma more somatically. In our group, it was brought up that this is evidence for integration therapy and talk therapy. However, van der Kolk goes on to say that talking is not enough, and that to truely heal the effects of trauma, the body must be allowed to act out its impulse to protect itself. (This is only hinted at in Chapter 12, and is better described and expounded upon in further chapters of the book.)
We were appalled at learning from the chapter that veterans from WWI were supposed to have been given pensions of $1.25 per day that they survived overseas, and when, in 1932, they camped out on the Mall in Washington D.C. to petition for their pensions, President Hoover had them forcibly removed. It struck me that it was soldiers who were ordered to expell their veteran brothers, as van der Kolk depicts: “Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas into the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames.”* I imagined being a soldier with a bayonet running at an older version of myself, a version that I was taught to despise and abhor, my loyalty to duty and country split with my loyalty to my brothers in combat. This cognitive dissonance leaves a sour note in the pit of my stomach, and I wonder what else these soldiers had to endure. No wonder PTSD is rampant.
At this point our group conversation took a turn. We came across van der Kolk’s assertion that “Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress,”* and we wondered how this chapter might connect with Liberation Theology. In my previous class, a fellow student of mine had given a book report on Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark, by Manuel Villalobos Mendoza. They told a story that Mendoza had written of, of a boy in a Latin American town who had been caught doing “women’s work” and whose family member had forced him to attend a brothel to have sex with prostitutes repeatedly. The boy was ridiculed and taunted because he could not acheive an erection under such circumstances. The boy ended up committing suicide because of this enforcement of “machismo.”
Another story arose among us. Melinda’s former Univeersity of Washington professor, Lesile Ashbaugh, studied workforces in Zambia. At first the workers had all been male, and they had been paid in cash for digging ditches along the highways. However, the workers were found to go spend their wages on prostitution and drink, so the employers changed the pay to food and housing for their families. It was found that the men would not work for food, and they stopped coming to work. But the women would work for food and housing. So it came to be that ditch-digging was considered “women’s work.”
With both of these stories, our group discussion centered on the extreme stigma against women, especially in Latin America. Central and Latin American Liberation Theology (at least within that that we have read in this context) does not address liberation on a feminist front, but only as advocacy for the poor. We agreed, Liberation must be for all. The foundational claim that Liberation Theology professes, “if one person is oppressed, all are oppressed,” must be claimed for all lives, feminine as well as male.
*Kolk MD, Bessel van der (2014–09–25). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Kindle Locations 3528–3529, and 3558–3559)Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
