“My words are the first to go.”
A loved one suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder told me what happens when she gets triggered. An unexpected touch, a startling sound, an unpleasant smell, and suddenly she can’t speak, can barely gesture to communicate her needs as her body spirals into panic.
As a witness to this triggering, it’s hard to help. Saying “You’re safe; You’re okay” doesn’t offer the reassurance I want to convey, because her body’s telling her she’s not safe and not okay. My mind races through questions and strategies that all feel inadequate and flawed in the face of her suffering.
These feelings of helplessness aren’t isolated to supporting my loved one with PTSD. When called upon to write an editorial or a prayer or a sermon in response to a devastating tragedy or ongoing American traumas, I often find myself at a loss for words. What could I possibly write or speak or pray that could make a dent of difference? The more I learn about how trauma is embodied, how it rewires the nervous system, how it is passed from one generation’s DNA to the next, the more helpless I feel in my desire to help and heal.
Warner M. Bailey highlights the Bible’s testimony to the kind of pain that leaves us speechless in his book Groaning: Sounds in Search of a Witness. Bailey focuses on the book of Lamentations, citing five references to groaning in its first chapter, making it, he writes, “the highest concentration of the experience of running out of words found in the Old Testament.”
According to Bailey, each reference to groaning in Lamentations acts like a poetic pressure valve to release the depth of the people’s pain. Groans escape from the biblical text like steam bursting from a boiling kettle. These sounds of suffering are in search of a witness — someone to hear and then serve as, Bailey writes, “suffering’s necessary echo.” The groans echoed in Lamentations seek the ear of God — and also God’s community.
Trauma studies reveal the healing nature of bearing witness to suffering. Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneer in trauma research, highlights social support as one of the most powerful protections against becoming overwhelmed by stress and pain. But what kind of social support matters. In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk writes, “Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.” According to van der Kolk, no doctor can write a prescription for the kind of healing that can be found through friends who truly care and communities that surround those suffering with love.
We may not have words that can comfort and reassure in the face of trauma. But we have an important healing role to play as witnesses. We can attend to people in pain. We can hear and hold their stories. We can love them enough to know and feel their pain ourselves.
It pains me to witness those I love in pain. But that is the nature of love, and its responsibility. When my loved one knows pain, I will pull up a chair to be with her, trying – with every cell of my body – to see as she sees, to breathe as she breathes, to feel as she feels. My words matter less in these moments of anguish than my attentive presence. We are in this together, and with God, bound by love to bear witness.
