Empowerment: Remembrance and Mourning

Remembrance

When a survivor feels safe she may choose to break the silence about her experiences—and tell her story in depth and completely. This takes great courage—from both the survivor and the counsellor.

The aim of this process is not exorcism, but integration. Truth-telling transforms the survivor’s experience into a testimony. Traumatic memory becomes a real memory—and this allows the survivor to integrate her experience into her life story.

The choice to do this lies with the survivor. The counsellor is there to offer support, stability, and skills for coping. Above all, she is a non-judgemental, compassionate witness and ally.

Throughout the process of reconstruction, safety is paramount. A survivor and her counsellor must walk a line between restoring horrific memories of the past and remaining safely in the present.

It can help for survivor and counsellor to agree on the structure of each session—what will be the pace of the work; when and how to take a break; what kind of support will be needed. It may be useful to create a comfort zone of some kind for rest and retreat; it may be helpful to develop shared ceremonies to begin and end each session.

Reconstruction begins by exploring the survivor’s life before the traumatic event took place. This encourages her not to view her life as being solely about the traumatic experience, but to be able to place that event within a wider, richer context.

Uncovering the traumatic event itself may take some time. To begin with the survivor may tell her story in a disassociated way—a recitation of events. But this alone will have little therapeutic value.

She must reconstruct not only what happened, but also what she experienced, in as much detail as possible. Her story must include, moment by moment, a reconstruction of locations and physical appearances; sensations—smells, sounds, what she saw or tasted, heart beats; and feelings—pain, fear, guilt, shame and disgust.

It is likely that her work will lead her to ask the two fundamental questions of victims of violence: “Why?” and “Why me?” To lay her experience to rest, she must find a way to answer these questions—making some sense of her undeserved suffering, constructing a new understanding of how the world works that involves new meanings and beliefs.

This may mean creating changes in her life—perhaps disconnecting from those who do not share her views and finding those who do; perhaps making the decision to take action.

Mourning

An experience of trauma can take so much away from an individual—if there is no physical loss, there is still likely to be emotional and psychological damage.

Telling her story, in such detail, will inevitably bring back not only the experience of violence, but also a strong sense of the losses she has suffered—and the grief that comes with that.

Many survivors resist this part of the process—perhaps because they fear that the grief will be insurmountable. Forms of resistance usually include three fantasies:

  • Revenge—in which the roles of attacker and victim are reversed
  • Forgiveness—in which the survivor’s pain is transcended through her own act of compassion
  • Compensation—where the perpetrator expresses genuine sorry for what he or she has done

But in the end, there is no magic solution that will wipe away the pain. The survivor must surrender to her grief and her tears. In doing so, she will contact her own strength and indestructible inner core.

After many repetitions, the traumatic experience becomes integrated among other memories—one part of her life. In the same way, her grief loses its power. Time is no longer spent on remembrance and mourning.

When she feels that time is moving again and she is no longer stuck in the past, a survivor is able to move onto the present—and plan for the future.

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