Trauma and Metaphor

Survivors of catastrophic trauma often find themselves at a loss for words, not because they have lost the capacity to use them, but because no words yet capture sufficiently the existential intensity and multiple levels of meaning of this particular experience with the abyss. Survivors say simply that it is unspeakable.

Unconscious experimenting with language to speak about the unspeakable is an essential part of the survivor's journey from traumatic state to recovery. The vehicle for this journey is metaphor. Metaphor captures trauma's biological sensorimo-tor impact, prepares the way for psychological metabolizing, and reconnects with the outside world. And in the close following of this word journey, the psychotherapist can best maintain a solid alliance with the trauma patient.

In this entry, the term metaphor is used more broadly than in the conventional sense of a figure of speech but, rather, as cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff use it, to describe words or phrases that act as cognitive and psychological organizers.

According to Lakoff, metaphors link subjective experiences to our sensorimotor experience. Metaphors supply the logic, the body's experience, to abstract concepts. These metaphorical modes of thought are automatic and unconscious.

When students protest that they do not “grasp” this concept, one need only show the physical act of grasping with one's hand, to illustrate how the simple motion of the infant has become metaphoric language. Thus, we “grasp” concepts today as we grasped physical objects to explore them as a small child. We apply our earlier physical and body-bound phrase “to grasp” to abstract ideas, and in that sense, we use metaphor to understand and master a new situation.

Similarly, trauma survivors unconsciously invent language by incorporating biological aspects of the experience into expressions that capture a crucial aspect of the trauma and project it onto their ongoing posttraumatic experience.

Sometimes these metaphors are easy to identify. Survivors of a fire at a supper club outside Cincinnati in 1977 said they felt “burned” by subsequent life experiences. Some survivors of a slag dam collapse in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, in 1972 said they felt their lives were “sliding downhill.” Vietnam veterans spoke of being “pinned down” and fearful—“no one is at my back.”

Sometimes trauma metaphors are more difficult to identify. Bill, an Iraq war veteran, expressing his current frustrations, said he felt like “banging someone's head against the wall,” then actually began doing it to himself, before his therapist helped him make the link to house searches in Iraq where he banged the heads of insurgents against the wall to the point of unconsciousness. Paul “picked at his boots,” annoying his therapist, until the pair connected the action with Paul's picking the brains of his dead buddy off his boots in Vietnam. Damon, another veteran, flew into a rage when confronted by his stepfather for “wiping dirt on a rug” in the [Page 692]front hall. He and his therapist traced this to an action used intentionally by Americans as they searched insurgent homes in Afghanistan, where the “rug” was both hair covering and prayer rug of the pious Afghanis and wiping dirt on it was an act to establish U.S. dominance. Josh experienced “crushing chest pain” physically representing the mental picture he still carried of the Vietnamese child whom he and his truck had run over.

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