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Part I Epistemologies of disorder and trauma This page intentionally left blank 1 The intelligibility of disorder Epistemological issues loom large in my reflections on loving wounded children, because attempting to help them and respond adequately to their needs often depends on grasping their thinking, their knowing, and their understanding of themselves and the world, which my partner and I share with them but do not perceive in the same ways. Of course, there are many ways that the thinking of trauma survivors can be affected. Sometimes it seems that the most appropriate metaphors for their knowing are those that suggest disorder, as thinking that has been disrupted by trauma can be confused and confusing, messy, muddled. On the other hand, though, it can also be extraordinarily insightful, perceptive and intuitive, as these characteristics may become part of the survival tools of the abused. Then too, some survivors’ thinking will exhibit cunning and a highly developed capacity for manipulation when the general survival strategy is based on controlling others to the best of their ability. Like the thinking of children whose lives have followed a more usual course, the thinking of traumatized children will change as they go through developmental stages, although their development may be somewhat different (often slower, for example, or it may be that certain cognitive abilities are damaged/changed due to disruptions in brain–center relationships) than their non-traumatized peers. In discussing ways that thinking and knowing are disrupted or malformed by trauma, I am assuming a picture of “standard epistemology” against which those disruptions can be compared. A picture of “Standard Analytic Epistemology” (SAE) has recently been articulated by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout in an article and book on the subject (Bishop and Trout 2005a, 2005b). The authors summarize this standard epistemology as “a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism (Chisholm 1981, Pollock 1974), coherentism (Bonjour 1985, Lehrer 1974), reliabilism (Dretske 1981, Goldman 1986) and contextualism (DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996)” (Bishop and Trout, 2005b, 696). In general, the questions in these epistemologies are whether our beliefs are actually true, whether they can be justified and if so how, and/or whether they can be counted as knowledge rather than mere belief. Foundationalism says that beliefs are justified as true or as knowledge on the basis of other already justified beliefs. Coherentism justifies beliefs on the basis of their “fit” with other beliefs; for example, on the basis of their logical consistency. Reliabilism requires that beliefs or knowledge be formed through a process that can be shown to reliably produce true beliefs/knowledge. Contextualism says that the context for our beliefs sets the standard for whether they can be considered true/knowledge. Another standard epistemology is one that deals with the question of what truth itself is and how we can know we have it or are justified in claiming it. Alvin Goldman claims that the most popular approach among these is correspondence theory, in which a proposition or belief, etc., is true just in case there actually is a fact or state of affairs in the world which corresponds to it (Goldman 1999, 42). Although Goldman explicitly positions his epistemology within the social realm, standard epistemologies generally do not (which is not to say they could not) emphasize the social and relational or the embodied aspects of knowing to the extent or in the ways that many feminist and non-white theorists tend to. Considering the activities of knowing from the perspective of trauma, especially traumatized children, shows how embodiment and the social are fundamental for knowledge-making and knowledge claims. This perspective helps make visible ways in which standard epistemologies leave gaps in our knowing activities, by assuming, for example, that all knowing proceeds in the same ways, that all knowers are essentially the same, and that consequently what is known by someone is the same as what must be acknowledged to be known, or at least be capable of being known, by all the others. As Lorraine Code says in explaining standard, dominant epistemologies, “if one cannot transcend subjectivity and the particularities of its ‘locations,’ then there is no knowledge worth analyzing” (Code 1995, 25). Code, who calls these “S-knows-that-p” epistemologies, explains them in terms of connections to Enlightenment legacies and “later infusion with positivistempiricist principles” such that they “have defined themselves around ideals of pure objectivity and value-neutrality” (24). It seems to me that looking at knowing in or through trauma shows the necessity of recognizing what Code and others have called the situatedness of knowers, and taking seriously what effects being situated has or can have on knowing. This does not imply that the standard epistemologies are simply and always mistaken, but rather that they describe some ways of knowing rather than all ways, or the knowing of some people some of the time rather than all people all of the time. The idea of a situated knowing emphasizes the “nature and situation – the location – of S” rather than simply paying attention to the content of p (Code 1995, 29), and thus allows us to recognize the importance of the subject of knowing in the production of knowledge. Because the subject of trauma may be seeing and experiencing the world in very different ways than “typical” subjects do, what they know may also be very different, as it is strongly inflected by that traumatic experience. 18 Epistemologies of disorder and trauma The illogic of trauma’s logic Standard logic has never been my strong suit, but in working with abused children I have become quite good at following illogic. This doesn’t mean simply “reversing” the rules of deduction. It is a matter of, as Andrea Nye (1990) says, learning to “read” what is being presented through words, eyes, body, and in this case, need. Children who have suffered abuse need to tell someone about it because they need help in understanding it and support in dealing with its effects, but most often they are not able to do this directly. A number of reasons may prompt this: they may, for example, be too young to even articulate it. Peg O’Connor talks about this in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion that the limits of one’s language create the limits of one’s world: if my language is literally inadequate to the task, I will be unable to make sense of my experience (O’Connor 2002, 82). In other cases, children may have been too effectively threatened (“I’ll kill you – or your mom, or your sister, or your dog – if you tell” is not an uncommon threat) and thus too afraid to tell. Or they may re-experience too much of the events when they even think about them to be able to verbalize them. They may also believe that if they tell you what awful things “they did” you will be disgusted and reject them. Psychologist Erich Fromm (1973) says that the strongest motivator of human action is probably fear. The terror of being abused is often compounded by this fear of being “found out”, of being revealed as the bad kids they believe they must be. So the line of thinking may go like this: “Everybody knows that good things happen to good kids – when you are good, you get good consequences/rewards. And bad things happen to bad kids. What happened to me is bad – I know that because I feel bad, and because I’m not supposed to tell anyone about it. So since bad things happen to bad kids, then I am a bad kid. And anyway, they told me I’m bad: they said that I made them do the bad things to me by being bad.” In working with abused kids, then, one may find this scenario: a child who has been abused may feel desperate to tell about it in order to get comfort, be reassured, find relief, find safety. You, working with them, are encouraging them to tell, saying it will be safe and you will not reject them and that it was not their fault. But what they know is, the truth is in actions, not in words. Perhaps the grown-ups who hurt them also loved them, also said they would protect them. Or those grown-ups told them they were bad, and that’s why they had to be hurt, and they made those words go with the actions. That is, they made the words concrete and real through their actions toward the child, on the child’s body. What is most real, most true, most knowable, is what is lived; that is what a child can know. Thus an epistemology of abuse/trauma is deeply embodied. Consequently, although you are telling them they are or will be safe with you, they cannot experience that safety because it has not been raised to the level of reality, of truth, by being enacted on/for them. It is only words. And the difficulty is that the reality they have lived is so real and so dangerous that they The intelligibility of disorder 19 cannot, no matter how much they want to, simply let go of it and believe what you say. They cannot trust the reality of your words until those words have become real enough to dislodge and replace the reality that was created through the abuse. How long does this take? Well, as the comedian says, “How long have you got?”