Pedagogies of Survival: Teaching Trauma in Traumatizing Times

“Here begynnyth a schort tretys and a comfortabyl 

for synful wrecchys, wherin

thei may have gret solas and comfort”

The Book of Margery Kempe

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Compassion and Comfort

I ask only that we feel together for a time. I cannot tell you to imitate my method. I cannot tell you to imitate my feelings. I cannot fix this, these traumas new and old. I ask only that you listen for a time to my feelings and you feel your feelings alongside mine. If something I feel resonates with you, perhaps the sympathies will better us and strengthen us. I blush to say that our compassions, our feeling-together, may comfort us. By comfort I mean that fortification that being-together can give to those it connects. Comfort embiggens us so that we might together face the traumas which might crush us alone. Somehow, the comfort of feeling-together makes us a one that is more than two, yet bigger than one alone. I seek comfort that I might offer comfort, something I do not have on my own. I ask that we feel together because the feelings come without my asking, because I cannot ignore or avoid the feelings and so they must be faced. The seminar must go on, students and teachers must go on. Yet, how do we do this, yet remember as Edutopia does, "When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too." Many of us need more than a "pedagogy of trauma" but also "a pedagogy of survival" that will not only instruct our students but assist in a collective reclamation of life, power, and self.

This past week has been a representative embodiment of much of the work I struggle with this semester and other times in my work as a scholar, mother, and activist. This past week I have been tasked to teach trauma in a traumatic time to traumatized students. I take one this task as someone who has also struggled with trauma. How do I teach a seminar, "Beyond Male and Female: Histories of Transgender and Non-Binary Gender," discussing how bodies are stolen, imprisoned in mental hospitals, subjected to abusive conversion therapy, and pressed towards suicide in Dylan Scholinski's memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress? Can you possibly engage pain that students in the class not only understand but have experienced, and still feel? How do I teach my seminar, "Racism and Human Diversity: Medieval Narratives of Blackness," discussing how the trauma of slavery meets the horror of sexism in the stealing of bodies in Beloved by subjugation, rape, and torture? If each lesson plan has an arc, a beginning, middle, and end, where is it that I can bring my students? Certainly we do not live in a world without the ghosts and illness of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and their thieveries. And the text does not offer any such wholesale escape or escapism. There is liberation, there is hope, there is exorcism, but the scars and pain remains. I cannot tell the students how to fix trauma, where they might run to flee racism, how they might undo the knots of sexism and rape. I can offer them what teachers (including Dylan Scholinski and Toni Morrison) have taught me: how to survive, how to leave, and how to reclaim what has been taken, broken, killed. Yet this requires us to feel where and when we are, to feel where we and others have been, to feel together and find some strength which we might call comfort.

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Trigger Warnings

My students are tired, so tired, and the trauma we must discuss and share is triggering of wounds that have not scabbed. The rape, suicide, torture, death, and abuse of racism, gender, and disability that our texts ask us to feel-with is so heavy and our students are already carrying so much. The hope is that, even if the texts cannot lighten our loads, at least they can give strength through a shared affect and struggle. Yet these connects are hard and demand what Morrison calls a thick sort of love. These are connections that happen at the point of wounds and scars. When students ask to leave the room, I commend their self-preservation and self-care. When they return, I am grateful for their compassion. These are the skills that students have learned to survive trauma. These are good skills. These are lessons we need to share and on which we are trying to build. Comfort may help us survive but it is no guarantee. Some of us may break under the strain. These are the stakes of our learning about trauma and survival, these are the costs, and these are our hopes. Some view "trigger warnings" as extraneous to teaching, even antithetical to teaching because it seems to offer our students an "out" from dealing with difficult learning. I don't see warnings that way. I see the warning a part of the lesson. I see the warning as part of thinking about trauma. I see the warning as part of survival. I see the lesson as part of this survival. This is the lesson Denver learns in Beloved: if one can leave, sometimes one must leave. Students do not leave class because they are experiencing the lesson on trauma any less but because they are experiencing the trauma and the lesson that much more.

A dilemma in teaching about trauma is that trauma rarely exists within a discreet period of time or along a linear temporal frame. Trauma is less like a line than an organic vine with recursive bends back toward the points of unresolved hurt, away from points of pain, and run all through with a twisting anxiety. As instructors, we teach our students to be ever conscious about context, and so we must also be. This is another way that "trigger warnings" may serve as more than a deterrent or excuse. Trigger warnings is a way of acknowledging that traumas we have experienced may not be over simply because we have been able to show up to class. This week, as we discuss the KKK, slavery, the persistence of racism and its damage, white supremacists are once again marching. This week, as we discuss transphobia, the systematic isolation and exclusion of transgender, and the despair unto death felt by trans and other non-binary persons, the federal government works to take away job protections for non-cisgender persons. This week, as we discuss rape and the abuse of women, the same federal government makes it harder for such women (all women) to reclaim agency over their bodies and sexualities. This week, as we discuss violence and the hate that will not die, a mass shooting kills several dozens and harms countless. Do we offer our students escape and refuge? Or do we offer them a place to rally and resist? What if some students desperately need the former and other students are eager for the latter? What if we, the instructors, are feeling crushed under the weight our times? Our times can be poignant reminders of the lingering significance of texts and histories that may be decades or centuries old. Our times can also leave us speechless, unable to think or argue because we feel so much. Some lessons are meant to transport us somewhere, lead us to some conclusion. Some lessons are meant to help us sit exactly where we are, when we are, and help us to exist and survive together. Sometimes, a lesson is successful not because of what students walked away with but because students (and ourselves) were able to walk away.

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The Lessons that Don't Happen

This sum of trauma may be that the best lesson plan is sometimes the lesson that does not happen. There is power is being able to consider the people in the room, consider the time and context of the room, to consider the instructor in the room, and then change the lesson. What are some of these changes? What lessons emerge when we let go of the classes that won't happen? (Lesson 1) Students have more power than they may know. I have had classes where I've worked to help my students understand trauma in a text. Other times students understand this trauma uneasily well and the lesson becomes learning with them how to survive. Showing our students that we can change, change our directions, change our locations, change our plans, is a way of teaching them the lesson that things don't have to be this way. We have the power to adapt, evolve, respond to our environments. By listening to the students in the room, we teach (or remind) them about their own power. (Lesson 2) Remind students its okay to think with their feelings. At the start of my seminars, I tell my students that nearly all my classes teach the same three lessons but in importantly distinct forms, embodiments, and contexts: how to perceive power dynamics, how to affect/effect power, and how to wrestle with the ethics of power. Understanding that emotions are key to how social power functions and is manipulated, and affective well being is essential to ethical considerations, is a lesson students do not get enough. By acknowledging the struggle of working through pain and fear as well as the ethical role of compassion and comfort, we place our student's experiences in the center of a class, not somehow outside them at an impossible objective and amoral distance. (Lesson 3) The classroom is not the only place where learning and growth can happen. Again, sometimes the best lesson is the lesson not given, when we teach our students about the power to turn a class day into a mental health day: to get sleep, to take a long lunch, to lighten a crushing work load, to find comfort in their own way. As Edutopia succinctly writes, "Brains in Pain Cannot Learn." This may feel like giving up, giving students the day off, but in our humility we are reminding students of their own power to survive, enact self-care, and learn. 

In the end, a pedagogy of survival is not a lesson plan I can set in advance or summarize for those looking to imitate it. Trauma is like a cancer, a form of life that grows and changes. Likewise, survival requires adaptability and transformation in response to classroom environments and the lives that populate them. The lesson is to be able to let go of our lesson plans when our students and circumstances change. This does not mean that there are no ways forward. There are many ways forward. Which ways is best for you and your students greatly depends on who you are, where you are, when you are teaching, and what we all bring to the classroom. On each of my seminars, I ended the last class of the week by compiling lists of ways in which we can reclaim our power, our lives, and survive. We drew from their experiences and the text's offerings. Among the list was the comfort of writing, the comfort of reading, the comfort of sharing one's feelings with another. In its own way, this is a function or hope of www.ThingsTransform.com. This is a corner of the internet where we may share a corner of our minds and hearts. For that, I thank you. Thank you for feeling-together with me for a time. I do not know what it is you felt but knowing you are there gives me some comfort. Sitting alongside my self, I am not sure what lesson I walk away with, but I am grateful that tonight I can walk away from my work, leave it here, and go engage with the things that transform me.

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On the Edge of Glory: Stabs of Absence

 “The body is not mute, but it is inarticulate; it does not use speech but it begets it...the challenge is to hear. Hearing is difficult not only because listeners have trouble facing what is being said as a possibility or a reality in their own lives. Hearing is also difficult because… they are also told on the edge of speech. Ultimately…it is told in the silences that speech cannot penetrate or illuminate.”

Arthur Frank, the Wounded Storyteller

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Amidst the Turbulent Noise of so many Comings-and-Goings, there are rare Arrivals: Little Glories which call out 'for Me have things come-to-be, for This have we struggled,' and after that instance are never seen again; the loss is real. 'Other things, other blessings, other glories...But never that. Never in all worlds, that.' --- And so we rejoiced and gave thanks for Critter Den. Now we begin to mark the Coming of something new: not a Void but an Absence.

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I. Speaking Through Our Amputations: External Absence

Loss is real, not simply imaginary. It is not a perceived lack inside us or the (mis)recognition of a void in the world. Things fill all spaces. When I speak of loss, I mean the severing of a connection we had with some thing or some one we love.

We love them for not being us, for being other, and by that we could continue to love them (philia; in relationship), love them (eros; as our telos), love them (storge; feeding on them), and love them (agape; feeding their needs). By this love, this intense sympathy between our bodies, we constituted something greater than our parts, a new thing called "us."

The loss of our beloved, the severing of that connection destroys something we were a part of, something we lived in and on, like (sometimes friendly) parasites. There is a real death, "us," exists no longer. Death is a transformation, things don't become void, things fill all space, but one of those things is absence.

Absence is hard to speak about, because it is definitively so hard to know. We feel a refusal to our attempts to connect, when we feel absence (in some respects it is ab-sense: a lack or refusal of sense). It is our hand which is slapped, our skin which burned, our heart which is frozen by an alienating looking. We try to breath in with the lungs of life that we used to have, in this body we used to be, and choke on the absence, double over from sense of amputation.

It may be that our beloved was imaginary or an ideal, I might say a potential, but these exist for us and we exist in them for a time. The loss of these hoped for wholes may strike us as hard as manifest relations in the bodies we saw these ideals in. In some cases, the appearance or change in these potential-lovers will shut down the potential relations which we had been participating in and holding on to. They may not feel any loss, because the person we lost was not them, but a potential being that existed for us until they severed our ability to connect to it.

These cuts may be done with the care of a surgeons knife, the operation may be to save the self or others, but we cannot always abide the anesthetic of need nor the painkillers of prosthetic replacements. For many of us, the loss of such things, while preserving lives, still killed others. We lost more than a limb, we lost a person (which was considered a totality, a glory, in and of itself). Thus like the wound or stump of an amputee, we carry the absence. It is more than the mark of trauma, it may be invisible in fact, it is a presence and a being that exists in place of our beloved. In this sense, by the lingering cut, we never let go of the scalpel.

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"St. Sebastian" by MILK

MILK, or Chiara Butista, is an artist from Tucson, Arizona.

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II. A Knife We Carry in Our Gut: Internal Absence

Our beloved may be gone, but absence lingers. Perhaps for as long as we exist at all, we will feel the stabbing pain of such loss. What we lost, in part, was also a way to relate to ourselves. We lost a "we" an "us," and the self that existed in and with this whole may not be able to live without it. The self may never be the same, it may never be as able (to do, to work, to live, etc.) as it was when it had another face. It may be no small loss of self, which now may or may not be able to carry on with the absence.

Absence can kill like the stab of an icicle, which breaks into "us" and severs life-sustaining connections, leaving the separated remains die (and bring about a new absence) --- all the while the ice melts and no onlookers will afterwards be able to see what was so deadly, what could possibly have been the thing that caused such a death, nor ever feel nor understand the coldness that was once there.

Many absences we can live with, as things that we carry, and may even stroke as the marker or tomb stone of things that no longer exist and to which we can no longer relate to as we had. Many facing death, the becoming absent for the self, may even be cheered by continual affirmation of our losses. We will join them in kind, in part, outside the kind of being we shared. Of course the absence which we produce will never be the same kind of absence, for we related to so many other things in so many other ways than we did our beloved or as a set of lovers.

I've used the words like "stabbing", which invoke violence, because however it may be seen to others, and even our selves at times, there is a way in which loss and absence cannot escape being violent. It is a transgression, an aggression, a forced separation, marring, wounding, disabling, harming that produces pain and suffering however it might be mitigated or justified.

As a thing we carry in our gut, it may continue to dig deeper and kill more of us, produce more wounds, suck the life out of more organs, over time. The pressure of other relations, work, or just the decay of time may push the blade deeper in and widen the wound of absence. We may not realize how much we needed our beloved or to be a part of that "us" until certain events make demands that can no longer fulfill in the same way. It may seem that as we sink more into absence, we realize how high our lover had brought us.

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III. Cutting Ties: Traversal Absence

Our love existed between two or more bodies, and thus with its loss, the absence exists at the nexus between the self and others. We may find that the wound does not allow kinds of contact, the amputation no longer can connect with prosthetics. We literally get bent out of shape, and it will take a new power of connection to create or sustain relationships with us and our hurt.

According to trauma theory, a dramatic amputation from our lives which produces sufficient suffering may make us unable to process our memory, relate to others outside the context of this event. We dwell on it and it may redefine what we are and what we are and are not capable of doing. Perhaps we shall find a way to work "through" the trauma, and open up new avenues by which new paths may be forged --- but we are finite beings with limits, and we may not have the necessary resources remaining.

Often our beloved was our link to a host of others, and with this loss the absence does not allow those networks to function in the same way. Like an unraveling rope or article of clothes, a cut or a hole in certain places will see the loss of more and more connections, more and more senses of collectiveness, and while some strands may be held together by other fasteners, some will suddenly drop away as solitary fragments.

Ecologies are motion, I was recently reminded, and with the loss of our beloved, those pieces of networks that stay connected may not have the same force or energy that they used to. The ecological body, the networked machine, may no longer have the motion to carry it to the resources that it kept in contact with. It may slow or halt in such a way as to prohibit the attainment of new or old pathways to be traversed.

And so, a loss may make us freeze up, unravel, stop being able to do the things we used to, or block the grounds on which we held our relationships with others. This may be a temporary phenomenon, until the body creates and changes, so as to build up new warmth, new connections, new modes or activities, and prepare ways in which we can come in contact again with the world.

Yet for all the things, external, internal, traversal, that the absence shuts down, more and more potential and actual relationships are lost. Unlike the void that can only exist as a singularity, absence is a multiplicity and perpetually generates more and more absence.

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