Urvi Bhuwania 13: How Much Can Time Truly Heal Trauma?
How Much Can Time Truly Heal Trauma?
Reading Beloved and seeing how much of an impact Sethe’s past in Sweet Home has on her present made me interested on how beneficial time truly is in healing wounds and how different people deal with PTSD. Throughout the first few chapters, Sethe is bombarded with old memories of Sweet Home by the smallest of triggers in her life after as a runaway slave. She gives up hope on ever truly moving on from her grief and resigns herself to the fate of being haunted by her past forever. This made me contemplate the potential of Sethe's life had she taken efforts to embrace and move on from her past and if truly moving past the grief of enslavement was ever truly possible. Even when Sethe asked her mom if she should move neighborhoods to hopefully find a more encouraging environment for herself and her daughter, Baby Suggs objects saying that her trauma and memories would haunt her in any house she tried escaping to. While Baby Suggs may have been wrong to impose her own pessimism onto Sethe, she may have had a point in that Sethe's external surroundings wouldn't have mattered much if she was still internally battling herself so fiercely.
Sethe's own conflict with her enslavement encompassed an important parallel to the PTSD that veterans face now when coming home from tours, an issue that often goes generally unresolved. It's interesting because typically when people think about moving on, they imagine the memories simply fading away until they are almost forgotten and no longer an issue. Many psychologists though, when treating people who exhibit various forms of PTSD, focus mostly on reiterating those memories and the excruciating pain that resulted from it to identify key events, people, and triggers that may help the person move on. Basically, the only way to truly ever move on from the past is usually not just to forget it, but accept it as a part of one's life and make a conscious choice to not let past memories affect the present. The concept of time fading away the pain felt from memories instead of the memories themselves is still a pretty familiar one though, but can time actually make trauma worse?
The pain felt when one is actually going through trauma is very different from the aftermath of it. When someone is going through something painful, there is a semblance of adrenaline that prevents you from lingering too hard on issues that would destruct one's mental sanity. For instance, when an officer goes to war and is placed in a situation of life or death, their pain will be much different in that they will not be given the opportunity to let any fear or doubt sink in. In a couple articles I read a while back, there were a lot of cases where the trauma only got worse for veterans because they let it fester, and reliving haunting memories of the past without addressing it properly only makes it worse as time goes on. This appeared to happen with Paul D as time only further fortified his reluctance to love anyone too much and to Sethe when the desperation and adrenaline and fear that led her to cutting her baby's throat faded into more and more misery as Beloved's baby ghost haunted her house and exacerbated Sethe's suffering and ability to move on.
Sethe's story and those of people today who suffer in PTSD seem to show then that the process of healing from trauma and past memories isn't always as simple as the phrase "time heals everything." Especially with such heavy issues, time can actually make things much worse in certain situations, meaning that while we shouldn't take on too much stress with every day to day problem, we should still keep in mind that our past memories can have a much greater impact on our present than we would like if we don't truly process them.
PTSD honestly sounds like such a horrible disorder to have. We are only given so long of a time to be alive, and if most of our time here on Earth is spent running away from or bracing ourselves from trauma, it is really unfortunate. I can definitely not imagine a life with PTSD, constantly being afraid of past memories. Hopefully there can be a more definitive cure for PTSD in the future and I hope that I never develop the disorder in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteHello Urvi,
ReplyDeleteI think no matter how much empathy a person has, they can never truly understand how trauma has settled on and impacted an individual. As someone who overthinks and unconsciously tries to understand how someone thinks, I find that traumatized or closed off individuals may be subconsciously going through more memories, thoughts, and emotional cycles than they express or can even perceive. The danger in this is the possibility that their body or mind will protect itself by suppressing those memories, ultimately changing their mentality. I worry that time may heal the damage we see on the outside or what an individual believes is the root of the trauma, but the subconsciousness will always remember. It will always store your suppressed emotions and that suppressed identity.
Hey Urvi, I constantly thought about how hard it truly is for people to live lives having to worry about getting hurt after a traumatizing experience. We've all had bad experiences that could go to the extent that causes trauma for an individual to the point where they closed themselves off to where they wouldn't be able to get hurt in any way possible. It's harsh to think about the people that have gone through that trauma because they live life scared instead of being able to live their lives to the fullest. Everyone always says to live your life without any worries, but is that even possible? I love how you referenced memories to Beloved because it has a bigger connection then I realized until I read your blog.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi, as always, your blog was incredibly informative and well written. The book Beloved really exemplifies the quote "time is healing" and I like how you connected this to the experience of war veterans. In Beloved, we see Sethe and Paul D largely affected by their experiences as a slave. However, years later, they have not moved past that, and still express huge guilt and sad emotions. This stays true for most who experience trauma, as they cannot move forward until they deal with the trauma head on, which is the challenge for most. I genuinely feel terrible for these people because facing trauma in order to move on could take months to years, and for many, it likely never occurs. Can they ever move past this to live their life? As we continue to read Beloved, I hope to find an answer to this question.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi, I enjoyed reading your blog as it was so thoroughly written. One idea that you mentioned that caught my attention was how people have separate pain tolerances when they are in critical experiences. I have seen this idea in the book I am currently reading, Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins, as he is able to make it past Hell Week with two injured legs. Goggins explains how when he was running laps during his strenuous training, the pain of his swollen legs slowly faded as he focused on the battle at hand. I feel this idea resonates with Sethe as she only becomes emotional when she reflects on the life she is living at 124. After Goggins stopped running, he too felt the pain jolting up his legs once again.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi! We are currently learning about mental disorders, including PTSD, in my psychology class right now. PTSD is a terrifying as exhibited by Sethe. She is unable to control the traumatic and intrusive memories of her past, often letting herself get carried away by the memory of her past experiences. It is often difficult for us readers to differentiate the past from the present in the book because even Sethe herself if unaware of the constant recollection of her memories.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi! Thank you for this much needed Beloved recap and analysis. It really is sad that trauma can be lifelong, and with time, only so much can be healed. I haven't considered time making these issues worse, which makes such even more unfortunate. Not everyone has access to alternate means of therapy, so I cannot imagine the lifelong burdens of trauma.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi, when people are recovering from PTSD, they have two options: going to people for comfort or blocking everything out and covering it up. Talking to other people—people you trust—about your trauma is extremely important for moving forward. When people block stuff out, it just haunts them long-term. Recently, mental health awareness has been more mainstream and it is picking steam since everyone can improve their mental health in some way. Mental health is largely connected to memories so it is important to have someone to help you unpack them.
ReplyDeleteHi Urvi, reading Beloved made me think about these themes and I realized how strong Sethe’s character is to continue functioning with such a traumatic past. The horrors of slavery are severe to the point that there aren’t adequate words in our language to define and describe them. Time probably cannot heal this type of trauma because It’s just too large. It’s also true the passage of time could be making it even worse as there is time to think, reflect, process, and relive the haunting experiences. Reading Beloved made me feel that the nightmare of slavery is never over for the people who experienced its brutality and there can be a situation where people exist who remain physically alive but whose spirit has been long dead, a realization that is very saddening.
ReplyDelete