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Authors: David J. Morris
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lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.
Trauma is not exotic, nor is it something belonging only to poorer regions of the world. It is not unique to the modern era, and while history tells us our responses to it evolve, trauma itself, what one pioneering researcher called âthe death imprint,â is immortal and ubiquitous. âTrauma is democratic,â Yale historian Jay Winter observed in a volume on the cultural history of World War I, as âit chooses all kinds of people in its crippling passage.âIt is little wonder that the ancient Greeks included a god of war in the pantheon of the universe: the historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only twenty-nine years in all of human history when there wasnât a war going on somewhere in the world.
The numbers are staggering: a 2010 study undertaken by the Department of Justice found that 18 percent of women in the United States have been raped and that around half of them will suffer from PTSD, some fourteen million women in all.The most cited research study on the incidence of trauma, a sort of Census of Misery known as the
National Comorbidity Survey
(completed before 9/11), found that approximately 55 percent of the U.S. population will be exposed to at least one traumatic event in their lifetime in the form of military combat, rape, physical assault, natural disaster, or automobile accident, roughly the same number of Americans who own smartphones.Alice Sebold, when asked why she chose to write about the rape and dismemberment of a fourteen-year-old girl in her bestselling novel
The Lovely Bones
, replied, âBecause itâs part of life. Itâs very much a part of the experience of what it is to live in this culture. It happens all the time.âPulitzer Prizeâwinning novelist Cormac McCarthy makes a similar point when he begins
Blood Meridian
, his dark masterpiece of violence in the American West, with a reference to a June 13, 1982, article in the
Yuma Daily Sun
that describes the discovery of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull that had been scalped.
Trauma defies description, but as an analogy it can be useful to think of it as a transfer of energies: like a bullet, it enters the body, angry, and with a surplus of power, eager to transmit it to whatever flesh it finds, doing its work and then exiting, leaving the troubled body behind, dragging a cometâs tail of memory, hope, and innocence through the air, looking for another body to complicate.Logic tells us that the larger the bullet, the greater the damage. In fact, one of the cardinal principles of modern trauma studies is built on this big-bullet little-bullet idea, which is what researchers refer to as the âdose-response curve.âIn plain English, the dose-response curve says that the more terrifying the event, the greater the potential for harm. To use a real-world example, the dose-response curve tells us that a thirty-one-year-old woman named Linda who is pinned beneath a heavy bookcase after an earthquake for an hour is more likely to survive without post-traumatic symptoms than if she had been pinned under a bookcase for twenty-four hours next to the body of her dead husband.
The dose-response curve explains a lot. It explains, for instance, the somewhat obvious fact that not all traumas are created equal and that trauma has a certain cumulative quality, in the sense that one terrible event can serve to âsoften upâ a person and make him or her more vulnerable to a later trauma. But as with all elegant theories, something gets lost in the translation to real life; some overlooked truth remains hidden. For anyone who has ever been to war or watched a brushfire consume the dreams and family histories of an entire suburb, the problem with this theory is obvious: How exactly does one go about quantifying trauma? What exactly qualifies as a
Trauma is not exotic, nor is it something belonging only to poorer regions of the world. It is not unique to the modern era, and while history tells us our responses to it evolve, trauma itself, what one pioneering researcher called âthe death imprint,â is immortal and ubiquitous. âTrauma is democratic,â Yale historian Jay Winter observed in a volume on the cultural history of World War I, as âit chooses all kinds of people in its crippling passage.âIt is little wonder that the ancient Greeks included a god of war in the pantheon of the universe: the historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only twenty-nine years in all of human history when there wasnât a war going on somewhere in the world.
The numbers are staggering: a 2010 study undertaken by the Department of Justice found that 18 percent of women in the United States have been raped and that around half of them will suffer from PTSD, some fourteen million women in all.The most cited research study on the incidence of trauma, a sort of Census of Misery known as the
National Comorbidity Survey
(completed before 9/11), found that approximately 55 percent of the U.S. population will be exposed to at least one traumatic event in their lifetime in the form of military combat, rape, physical assault, natural disaster, or automobile accident, roughly the same number of Americans who own smartphones.Alice Sebold, when asked why she chose to write about the rape and dismemberment of a fourteen-year-old girl in her bestselling novel
The Lovely Bones
, replied, âBecause itâs part of life. Itâs very much a part of the experience of what it is to live in this culture. It happens all the time.âPulitzer Prizeâwinning novelist Cormac McCarthy makes a similar point when he begins
Blood Meridian
, his dark masterpiece of violence in the American West, with a reference to a June 13, 1982, article in the
Yuma Daily Sun
that describes the discovery of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull that had been scalped.
Trauma defies description, but as an analogy it can be useful to think of it as a transfer of energies: like a bullet, it enters the body, angry, and with a surplus of power, eager to transmit it to whatever flesh it finds, doing its work and then exiting, leaving the troubled body behind, dragging a cometâs tail of memory, hope, and innocence through the air, looking for another body to complicate.Logic tells us that the larger the bullet, the greater the damage. In fact, one of the cardinal principles of modern trauma studies is built on this big-bullet little-bullet idea, which is what researchers refer to as the âdose-response curve.âIn plain English, the dose-response curve says that the more terrifying the event, the greater the potential for harm. To use a real-world example, the dose-response curve tells us that a thirty-one-year-old woman named Linda who is pinned beneath a heavy bookcase after an earthquake for an hour is more likely to survive without post-traumatic symptoms than if she had been pinned under a bookcase for twenty-four hours next to the body of her dead husband.
The dose-response curve explains a lot. It explains, for instance, the somewhat obvious fact that not all traumas are created equal and that trauma has a certain cumulative quality, in the sense that one terrible event can serve to âsoften upâ a person and make him or her more vulnerable to a later trauma. But as with all elegant theories, something gets lost in the translation to real life; some overlooked truth remains hidden. For anyone who has ever been to war or watched a brushfire consume the dreams and family histories of an entire suburb, the problem with this theory is obvious: How exactly does one go about quantifying trauma? What exactly qualifies as a
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