The World of Trauma
One thing I want to talk about is the
overarching theme of trauma and how it relates to not only about the things we
talked about in class but in the real world as well like PTSD. I feel like PTSD
is something that isn’t highly talked about in society. A lot of people expect
that when soldiers come home from war it will be the same as before they left.
And that couldn’t be further away from the truth.
The trauma of war has a specific effect
on people. Soldiers have done things that alter oneself and thinking that those
effects can be turned off like a light switch is wrong. One specific soldier
describes his first time experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder in a
VaintyFair article. He had just returned from Afghanistan two months ago. “By
the time I got home, though, I wasn’t thinking about that or any of the other
horrific things we’d seen; I mentally buried all of it until one day, a few
months later, when I went into the subway at rush hour to catch the C train
downtown. Suddenly I found myself backed up against a metal support column,
absolutely convinced I was going to die. There were too many people on the
platform, the trains were coming into the station too fast, the lights were too
bright, the world was too loud. I couldn’t quite explain what was wrong, but I
was far more scared than I’d ever been in Afghanistan” (Junger). This is a
classic case of someone coming back home but the trauma of what they
experienced has also followed them. It is really sad that these things go unnoticed
by mainstream media because soldiers have fought to protect this country and
people in it, and when they come back the damage that has been done to them doesn’t
even get recognized.
Some of the side-effects of PTSD are nightmares,
flashbacks, anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts. These are things that impact
one’s daily life and it all stems from trauma. I would like to think that that
PTSD shows how powerful trauma is and how its effects can last far beyond when
the traumatic experience happened. We see this for example in Beloved.
In Beloved Sethe was a freed slave
but she also went through traumatic experiences when she was a slave. The tree
on her back is a perfect example of this. Not only is the tree on her back a symbolic
example of trauma and all the horrible things she experienced at Sweet Home,
but it also is a physical example as well.
Another example in Beloved is at the
end of the book when a white man shows up. Sethe thinks it’s her former slave
owner and she lunges at him and tries to kill him. She reacted this way because
of the trauma she went through. In a way i think Sethe had PTSD as well. The
sight of this man triggered a flashback of her old life and the pain and
sacrifice that was in it.
I thought that this was a great example
because it connects what we have learned and read in class to real life
situations. The effects of trauma are strong and last a lot longer than some
might think, and sometimes the effects may never go away, and then we are all
stuck with a tree on our back.
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