by Ronna Milo Haglili, Psy.D.

ON ACTIVISM AND TRANSFORMATION OF TRAUMA

I thought I was being deliberate when I decided on my dissertation topic. I considered my interest areas, the potential significance of certain research questions, and used a Venn diagram to narrow down my list. I ended up conducting a qualitative study about the links between experiences of past trauma and social activism, in particular the meaning that social activists have made of their trauma and the ways in which social action has shaped their traumatic experiences and vice versa. Later, I discovered I was engaged in a much less deliberate process of my own meaning making, as a politically informed subject who experienced past trauma myself. I realized, as I moved along, how ashamed I was of the past trauma inflicted on me, so much so that I started researching it.

I believe that through our everyday mundane experiences, we are attempting to make meaning of our past experiences. Past trauma may inform the present, which in turn may demarcate the traumagenic nature of our past. In my research, I suggested that social activism may serve as an arena to engage in, make sense of, and reshape past trauma that social activists have grappled with. We may form different meanings and embody a new sense of being based not only on things we say (e.g. to our therapists) but also based on things we do.

We need others, or some form of otherness that is outside of ourselves, for our experiences to be witnessed and affirmed. When my two boys were young and I took them to the playground, I occasionally zoned out plunging into my own thoughts. Immediately, they would call me out, demanding every bit of my excitement. Although his Bar Mitzva is coming up, my older son still gains immense pleasure when I witness his basketball shots. On the contrary, we may be deeply saddened for the deceased had they not been witnessed in their last moments.

When it comes to traumatic experiences, a dialectic and mutual process of witnessing the self and the other may spur trauma toward transformation. In my research I proposed that such witnessing may occur via activism, as reflected in stories shared by participants. A particularly memorable testimony was of a social activist who had long engaged in social justice and feminist activism and who was a survivor of sexual trauma. She reported that personal and communal aspects of her activism helped her put her trauma in context and thus kept her trauma bound to the past rather than having it “be everywhere.” Acting against the traumatization of women was, to her view, a way to “undo” what had happened to her.

For unspeakable, all-encompassing trauma to form a more bounded psychic structure, a lack must be acknowledged, with compassion rather than shame, and conflicting parts of ourselves need to be integrated. My older son told me the other day that he is afraid of growing up. I replied, “Well, perhaps you want to grow up as much as you want to stay close to me and your dad.” “Yes!” he exclaimed in relief. “I am full of conflicts! I am a whole person!” As for me, my heart was full. I allowed him something I did not get in my own childhood. I witnessed him, and myself, and something moved in both of us.