Conrad Jorge
November 21, 2010

Identity after Traumatic Experiences

Most of us have experienced or seen the effects of trauma, whether we experienced it first hand or though a shared experience that struck close to home. Trauma is unavoidable, the result of experiencing something that is too difficult to cope with. In “Selections from Losing Matt Shepard”, Beth Loffreda discusses the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie Wyoming and it’s traumatic effect on the university and community as a whole. She focuses heavily on the idea of identity, both that of the individual and the shared identity of the community after the traumatic event of his death. Trauma is of particular interest to Martha Stout, author of “When I Woke up on Tuesday, It was Friday”. She questions idea of sanity and whether we can truly call ourselves sane. She uses examples of her patients to discuss the effects of trauma on a person’s memory, feelings, and ultimately their identity. In “Into the Wild”, Jon Krakauer implies some of these same concepts with the story of Chris Candles and his travels in the Alaskan wilderness. Through out the story Chris seems to be searching for his own identity and seemingly trying to cope with damage and after effects of childhood trauma. Trauma as personally experienced or shared through a community causes a disconnection between individual and shared identity, significantly damaging and profoundly affecting our self and shared perceptions, feelings, and opinions of ourselves and the world around us. As a result we are challenged to either over come our past traumas or succumb to them; in other words our reactions to past trauma determines whether we are able to reconcile our identities.

Trauma can be caused by many different sources, it can be the result of an accident, a malicious attack or and act of God to name a few, but a common thread between many aspects types of trauma is the disconnect that can occur either to an individual or a community after the traumatic event. After September 11, 2001, many people can remember feelings of numbness as their mind began to deal with the events of that day. This feeling of numbness and disconnectedness is similar to what Jon Krakauer demonstrates when he writes about Chris McCandless and his journey “Into the Wild”. Krakauer implies that Chris has experienced some type of trauma in his child hood, “He didn’t get along with his folks too good… his dad was a genius, a NASA rocket scientist, but he’d been a bigamist at one time–and that kind of went against Alex’s grain. Said he hadn’t seen his parents in a couple years, since his college graduation.” (346) This experience during his childhood seems to have left him disconnected not only from his parents and in a way society as a whole, he is driven by a an urge to get away from it all. After all he is heading to the Alaskan wilderness alone. Similarly, this concept of disconnectedness is clearly demonstrated by Martha Stouts patient Julia, a victim of brutal trauma during her childhood. Julia’s disconnect played out in an internal, personal type of way. Martha Stout states, “ I asked Julia about her teachers, and she could not remember a single one of them, not from grade school, not from middle school, not from high school. She could not remember whether or not she had gone to her highs school prom or her high school graduation. The only thing she seemed to remember vividly from childhood was that when she was about twelve, she had a little terrier dog named Grin, and that her mother had Grin put to sleep when he needed an expensive stomach operation. (661) Unlike Chris, Julia does not feel disconnected from the people around her, she is at times completely unaware of herself or the people around her. The disconnect she experiences as a result of her trauma is more sever and total and occurs outside of her control. However, just as September 11 demonstrated, traumatic disconnects are not experienced solely by individuals but can impact entire communities. The traumatic event of Matthew Sheppard’s murder affected the community and to an extent the nation as a whole. After his death the town of Laramine was bombarded by national media and depicted as a place where this sort of thing happened often. This attack on the local population challenged peoples since of identity. Beth states, “There was a tremendous outpouring of support… not all of them, not even a substantial portion, but some of those people–if they had known matt was gay while he was alive, would have spit on him. But now it was a cause, and that made me upset. Not that I think you can’t grieve over this because you’re straight or anything like that, but I just questioned the sincerity of people.” (377) As a result of the negative attention the community received after the media coverage people felt disconnected from their communal identity, and where caught up in the cause that had become Matthew’s death. Trauma causes a significant disconnection between individuals, whether internal or with their surroundings, and can even impact communities. This trauma can have a significant and profound impact on the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes we feel towards ourselves and the world around us.

PTSD, a server form of trauma, is something we all hear about in the news lately. It demonstrates the significant impact that soldier’s traumatic experiences can have on them when they return home. They suffer from depression, anxiety, and are prone to suicide. The aftermath of trauma affects everyone in a different way. As a result of Chris McCandless child hood experiences and his resulting disconnect from the society around him, he ventured out into the Alaskan wilderness. Chris writes inside of the bus, with his alter ego name Alexander Supertramp,

“Two years he walks the earth, no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes, ultimate freedom… and now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.” (349)

Chris’s seems to have been searching for his identity out in the wilderness of Alaska away from the civilization he seems so detached from, even referring to them as poison, the effects of his trauma driving him to seek isolation and pushing him to severe and in the end deadly attempts to reconcile his trauma. Similarly, Julia also suffers significant and profound effects from the aftermath of her trauma. She not only looses huge portions of her life at a time but also looses completely perception of herself. At one point Julia is suffering from a ruptured appendix but because she is in a dissociated state she is unaware of the pain/warning her body is trying to send to her. She states, “The doctor kept asking me, ‘didn’t you feel anything? Weren’t you in pain?’ I told her my stomach had been upset that morning, but I didn’t remember any real pain.”(673) The profound effects of Julia’s traumatic child hood had damaged Julia to the point that she looses complete awareness of herself to the point where her life can be in danger and she does not even notice it. As before, the aftermath of trauma can have a profound affect on more than just an individual, in Laramine Wyoming the effects of Matthew Shepard’s murder cause an entire group of people to experience a significant disconnect with the people around them. Loffreda states, “Gay and Lesbian members of the university that I spoke to felt a wrenching mix of fear and sadness; many… were also immediately and intensely angry.” (374) Because of the shared trauma the lesbian and gay community was feeling after Matt’s death perceptions and feelings towards those around them where changed. They were scared that something might happen to them and angry that Matt had been killed. The effects of trauma have a significant effect on both individuals and groups as a whole in the aftermath of the experience.

Victims of trauma or often faced with a decision, they must either overcome the profound affects they are experiencing or they will continue to suffer the pain and aftermath their trauma has left them. One of the reasons Chris McCandless set off for the wilderness of Alaska was to face his disconnect with the civilization around him. After spending some time in the wilderness, “Satisfied, apparently, with what he had learned during his two months of solitary life in the wild…He seemed to have moved beyond his need to assert so adamantly his autonomy, his need to separate himself from his parents. Maybe he was prepared to forgive their imperfections: maybe he was even prepared to forgive his own. McCandless seemed ready, perhaps, to go home.” (352) Although Chris never made it home, he had been able to face that decision and overcome the effects of his childhood trauma. He was ultimately able to reach a point of healing and peace, regaining his identity. Like Chris, Julia was also faced with the same tough choice. Either what certainly face death or she would face the demons that plagued her past. Having realized that something in her past was causing her depression. She ultimately decides, “I don’t want to die because I can’t feel anything. I don’t want to end up dead because I can’t feel what’s going on in my body, or because I can’t tell the difference between that psychosomatic pain I’m always getting in my chest and some honest-to-God heart attack.”(674) Julia having been faced with the same choice to overcome or submit to her past trauma chooses to attack it straight on, she chooses to reconcile her identity and come to terms with her past. Lastly, those affected by the shared traumatic experience of Laramine must also face their decision, to either do nothing and continue their course or change their experience for the better. Beth Loffreda states, “One student… told me that before Matt’s death he “straight-up hated fags” It hadn’t occurred to him that there actually were any gays or lesbians around… after seeing students cry in one of his classes as they discussed Matt’s death... a real breakthrough: he felt a little sick, he told me, that he had thought things about gays that the two killer had probably been thinking about Shepard.”(381) As a result of the murder of Matthew Shepard the people of Laramine had to make choices regarding their identities. Did they support human life in all it’s forms, did they hate homosexuals, these where choices that had to be made. For this young man he reconciled his identity, and realized he didn’t want his identity to be associated with the two that had murdered Matt. Like many victims of trauma Chris, Julia and the residents of Laramine had to make their decisions and decide their identities after their shared trauma.

Trauma in it’s many forms shares a common thread amongst its victims. They all suffer an experience so painful it deeply affects their outlook and personal identities. We should all strive to be mindful of the affects of shared traumas such as the post 9/11 world we live in. Events will continue to occur that traumatize and affect us all. Whether as individuals or a shared collective we should seek to minimize the disconnect, and subsequent loss of identity that occurs after trauma. What happens if we are unable to be objective even after traumatic experiences? We run the risk of making mistake like imprisoning or entire sections of our population as we did after World War II. We should remember that the decisions we make will affect how we reconcile our identities after traumatic experiences.