I think I may have been traumatised by the number of times I am hearing the word trauma. You can’t look at television, listen to the radio or read a newspaper these days without bumping into the word.
Strangely, until 20 or 30 years ago, I would seldom have heard anyone talk about trauma and, until then, a good few of us might have had to look up what the bloody word meant.
It is true that words will always come and go, sometimes even change their emphasis and meaning, but at a time when mental health has become so central and concerning in both personal and communal living, trauma has taken on a significance that it certainly would not have had when I was growing up.
That Belfast man CS Lewis hit the same nail straight on the head. In one of his essays, he wrote: “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’. Otherwise, you will have no words left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
Change the word ‘infinite’ to ‘trauma’ and that is what I am trying to say.
Sadness, hurt, pain, loneliness, fear, anxiety, despair and many other emotions are the stuff of life, arising out of the human condition. In themselves they are miles from the reality of trauma. Trauma is an experience that is well beyond the parameters of normal human emotions.
I think it was a word that was originally confined to physical injury but nowadays, outside of general hospitals, it is used to describe severe emotional and psychological damage. But it has also been mainstreamed, almost normalised. It is the go-to word to describe everything from hitting your finger with a hammer to suffering post-traumatic stress (PTSD).
Most of us use the word lazily to describe a multitude of scenarios and we are well aided by poor media presenters, and even by a growing number of medics, who either don’t want to or have not the time to be more specific and precise.
I worked for a long time as a therapist or a counsellor. I loved the work but was never comfortable with the title therapist/counsellor.
Most people I came across had some hurtful memories of childhood. Some had atrocious experiences as children. But I would have thought that only a handful suffered real trauma.
One of the very important elements in their recovery was for people to talk in a way that was true to themselves, in their own words, their own language, their own accent.
The ones who were the most difficult to work with and who often failed to recover were the ones who spoke in jargon. The ones who had gone to a few courses or read a few books about therapy and had adopted the jargon.
Words that were not their own closed them down rather than opened them up.
I had also spent very short time in America in the early seventies and had an insight into the beginning therapy culture, where everyone who could afford it had their therapist. I dreaded that Ireland would follow suit.
Therapy and counselling are too important to be a fashion and those who work as therapists would be well advised to have a healthy scepticism about the import of what they do.
Therapy and counselling are too important to be a fashion
I still have a great fondness for a book called Against Therapy by a psychiatrist called Masson. Written years ago, hated by the critics, but the advice of being suspicious and even antagonistic to the professionalisation of anything to do with human relationships is not to be sneered at.
So the next time the trauma word falls from your lips, you are to blink your eyes, purse your lips and resolve to do better in the future.