Healing from trauma

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud… Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried … ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. … Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims (Herman 1992, p. 1).
This dialectic – to tell or remain silenced – is central to the experience of trauma: desires for acknowledgement and forgetting coexist (Bar-On 1989, p. 325). Trauma rewires brain circuits so that the body no longer responds ‘normally’ (Van der Kolk 2014), thereby distorting one’s relation with self but also society, such that the capacity for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity and intimacy are devastated (Herman 1992, p. 133). In some cases, this goes on for a lifetime, even into generations beyond. However, healing may come through many avenues, but requires a safe environment where the survivor is empowered to reconstruct the traumatic story and restore connections with the community (Herman 1992, p. 133). A surprising avenue of healing can be seen in the lived religious practice of the Zen Peacemakers: Bearing Witness Retreats in sites of collective suffering. Through the Three Tenets – not knowing, bearing witness and loving action – Bearing Witness Retreats open ritualized spaces to recall traumatic events, confess the unspeakable, acknowledge the experiences of one another, drawing together a community reconnecting not only those called ‘victims’, but also ‘perpetrators’. While the Zen Peacemakers’ approach is not a therapeutic method, this engaged spiritual practice includes all domains of human experience and therapeutic attention, thus addressing trauma, grief, the distortion of social interaction, but also joy, sharing, encouragement. The chapter bears witness to one German experience of this retreat in Auschwitz/Birkenau, including a ritual, the Gate of Sweet Nectar, which takes seriously the psycho-spiritual damage of violence by welcoming and feeding the hungry spirits – e.g. the ghosts of genocide, marginalization and our own shadows.