Recognising Trauma

Life in the invisible fellowship no one chooses to join

It’s fairly widely acknowledged that recognising mutual experiences or interests in another person often paves the way to connection and friendship. Most of us have entered social environments where there is little to stimulate us or make us want to stay in the room, only to spark up one conversation that reaches to the heart and soul of motives and interests. Such moments are precious.

Perhaps the most famous and widely quoted version of this moment of kindling friendship is found in CS Lewis’ The Four Loves,

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one’.

This kind of connection can be forged around things as diverse as medieval manuscripts or motor mechanics, racket ball or Rachmaninov. What counts is the deep-seated commonality that such connections bring, a delighted affirmation that someone else feels as passionately as we do about a treasured interest.

In this article, I want to suggest that, explicitly and subliminally, there is a bond between people who have experienced significant trauma in their lives; an unspoken sense of concord and confidence, even where wider trust gives us trouble. I want to suggest some reasons for this, and some of the ways this sense of mutuality can benefit us in our lives.

The isolation of the unbroken world

If you have experienced trauma in your life, dear reader, you will know how disorienting it is to meet people who simply have not. Although not universally true, having one’s heart broken can so sensitise us to the pain of the world that we find it hard to credit that anyone around us has not tasted at least some of the bitter fruit that our world produces. Meeting someone with a linear life narrative, a Lego-brick-perfect sense of fit in their world and its circumstances, can leave us either doubting the other person’s narrative, or where we ourselves have gone wrong.

There are, undoubtedly, people whose path in life is plain and relatively free of pain, there are others who live in happy denial of private dislocations. When we, conscious of our brokenness, encounter such individuals, finding common ground can be very tough. On one side is our sense of self-protection in talking about our biography in its complexity, and often there is insensitivity from the other side as well. In these circumstances, no one is actively seeking to isolate the other, but the two experiences of the world on each side are so disparate that connection is almost impossible.

Without doubt, the greater (perhaps entire) weight of this difference is felt on the part of the traumatised. While not defined by the things that happen in our lives, we are shaped by them, and channels of experience, emotion and instinct are opened up for us when our hearts are broken. To come into an environment where a person or people have known fair sailing in life can make us feel abnormal, damaged and awkward. The result is isolation - either by excluding ourselves from company, or by masking our true heart while in it. Neither approach works for our flourishing.

Common cause with hope’s horizon

Perhaps it is because of this wider isolation that we almost immediately recognise other people who perceive themselves as broken in some way, who have been cast against the rocks of relational ruptures, church fractures, personal losses, or periods of doubt. Without saying much to one another, we can readily perceive that someone has a story to tell like our own, that there is some shared vulnerability or woundedness that has come simply by virtue of living in the world. For those who have never experienced this, it is difficult to describe. This recognition of trauma does not lie in what is said or explicitly portrayed, but is communicated through our posture towards the world, our approach to conversation, and a certain readiness to listen where others might simply breeze on by.

It might be tempting to quip that ‘misery loves company’, but the dynamic I am describing here is far from the convening of a pity party. Recognising trauma might begin by being an identifiable fellowship in hurt but, in my experience, it quickly moves to being a fellowship of hope.

To meet with an individual grazed by the merciless gears of a fallen world, bruised by the treatment they have received from others, or the heartbreak they have incurred through losses, is not simply to encounter another person with a sad story to tell; it is to meet someone whose continued connection with the world is nothing short of a miracle. Here is a living, breathing person, a fellow image bearer, who has been broken on the wheel of hard circumstance but is still seeking connection, is still visible in some way to a world from which they might just as easily have isolated themselves. The striking up of a conversation between two such people is to hear the faint strains of God’s swelling overture of grace in the world; it is the fanning of the smouldering wick of hope that someone, this person standing right in front of me, is still here and can still connect with me, albeit through woundedness.

This means that recognising trauma in one another is to bear witness to the truth that it need not have the last say, that there are other souls surviving through the sting of disappointment, loss and heartbreak and that their life has remained sufficiently open to accommodate a new connection with someone previously unknown to them.

Some of the most hopeful, heaven-facing, candid, grace conversations I have had in my life are with people who have tasted pain, who can perceive pain in me and who wish to connect - not to probe one another’s wounds but to prove God’s abiding work even when we cannot understand him or discern his purposes.

The breaking (and remaking?) of friendships

Much of what I have mentioned in this article up to this point might summarily be referred to as ‘trauma bonding’, and passed off as fairly unremarkable. What intrigues me, however, is how and why such conversations happen and why they occasionally are the prelude to new friendships.

I have no sociological evidence for this, but I do wonder if the loneliness some of us experience can, in part, be attributed to trauma recovery. If a person has had to disconnect from an old life that was doing them harm, if relationships have become strained and unhealthy, our lives impacted by abuse, or if our church or other social community has become a closed door to us, the loneliness and friendlessness that follows is quite profound. This often means that a person experiencing the fallout from hurt and injury is left to sift through the rubble in relative solitude, bereft of the support structures that their life has leaned on for years.

This can be the case at any age, but I do question if midlife friendlessness and isolation are sometimes due to this phenomenon as well. To reach one’s forties or fifties, severed from old sources of companionship, with a sense that the narrative arc of our lives has been intercepted or interrupted, is to find oneself in a place of serious isolation, occasionally with little prospect of forging new connections.

When we are in this position, the hint that someone we have met is facing similar marginalisation as a result of circumstances that resemble our own can be hugely empowering and hope-engendering. To discover this kind of ‘you too?’ connection when many of our other conversations cannot reach the events or outcomes that have stripped our lives back is a relief and occasionally an entry point for new friendships to develop. Where full-blown friendship doesn’t follow, there is at least a fortifying sense that our experience is not unique, that we are, after all, normal people facing feelings and afflictions that others have partaken of as well.

Conclusion

If trauma recognition is something you have experienced, I hope that this post might be relatable for you. I trust that early moments of connection with other people might develop into fuller companionship for you in your road to recovery. And if there are few environments to corroborate your feelings, I trust that reading this post might serve as a second-best proxy.

If such conversations and connections have not yet been yours, I am praying that my readers will encounter others who share their pain and the courageous path towards rebuilding that you are walking. If loneliness (at whatever life stage) has been brought on by the forced severances that old harm has brought, I am praying for you today; and if friendlessness is compounding the other ruptures that have blighted your path, I am praying that somewhere, someone might be likewise looking for a person who shares and sees their pain and is praying for companionship too.

The experiences and emotions that this article has lightly probed are different for each person, but if no one else has said it to you recently, allow me: you’re not alone; your traumatised life is not an oddity or statistical outlier, isolation after severances and breakages is incredibly common, and your continued pressing in to connection with others speaks to the courage and compassion that characterise you. I am privileged to be in fellowship with, if even just through this article.

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