The Heart Keeps the Score: Judith Herman and the Moral Context of Trauma Theology

In her magisterial book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman opens by remarking that “the study of psychological trauma has a curious history—one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion.” (2015, 7). Herman calls this the “dialectic of trauma” and sees it as a kind of unfolding in history of the alternation between symptoms of hypervigilance and dissociation at the heart of posttraumatic stress. If Herman is right, then our society is currently experiencing the first “symptom” of hyperactive interest in the subject.

 

Since the original publication of Trauma and Recovery in 1992, Herman has recently released a new book called Truth and Repair (2023) that adds to growing public interest in trauma and promises to be as groundbreaking as her first work. Importantly, the new work adds a fourth stage to her previous three stages of trauma care that have proven canonical for trauma studies and trauma therapy. In addition to (1) establishing safety, (2) remembrance and mourning, and (3) reconnection, Herman now adds a final stage simply called (4) justice. Herman’s entire book centers around the intuition that trauma recovery can never be complete if it does not entail a process that accounts for the social imperative of a moral community to enact justice for survivors in the aftermath of violence.

 

In many ways, Herman’s book directly raises the moral context that normatively accompanies traumatic experience for survivors of violence. While trauma studies are gaining popularity today, increased public awareness trades on reductive summaries that tend to elide this moral context of trauma in favor of stress-based models acceptable to modern medicine. A clear example of this can be illustrated by the work of Bessel van der Kolk (2014), whose best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score has popularized trauma in mainstream culture by foregrounding a stress-based approach using the construct of PTSD. As Warren Kinghorn has shown (2020), this domestication of trauma as a diagnostic concept involves what I call a kind of “moral bracketing” that underwrites medical models in psychiatry today. Following Kinghorn, I demonstrate this reduction by examining the political and medical history of psychiatry in general and the particular evolutions of trauma studies within that history. The net result, as I see it, is that trauma has entered the medical and popular mainstream, though at the cost reducing the very phenomenon from overarching moral violation to the mere overwhelm of an organism’s stress-response. The traumatized organism’s body keeps the score, not necessarily the moral or political context of that traumatized body. The moral context of trauma is lost to the medical clarity of PTSD.

 

This creates unique challenges for integrating trauma studies into morally-saturated disciplines like theology. This is acutely felt when such disciplines seek to intentionally foreground existential and moral insights from trauma into elemental approaches of their discipline, as in the case of an emerging theological sub-discipline called “trauma theology.” Drawing on the work of Serene Jones (2009) and Shelly Rambo (2010; 2017) among others, I show how a major concern of trauma theologians is to “listen to trauma beyond its pathology to the truth that it tells us” (Caruth 1985, vii-viii). That is, trauma theologians are concerned with moral and existential insights that witnessing trauma opens to theologian reflection. Yet, if trauma is conceptualized primarily as a stress-response that brackets morally injurious contexts, the insights available to trauma theologians may be limited.

 

How can interdisciplinary research include wider approaches to the full spectrum of traumatic experience beyond popularized medical models? In this paper, I draw from moral injury research to resource what I call “morally expansive” approaches to trauma theology. By “morally expansive” approaches, I mean approaches to trauma theology that account for the full spectrum of traumatic experience and therefore include moral and political violation as contexts that are no less primary for conceptualizing the integration of trauma into interdisciplinary research than the popularized stress-based models. To make this point, I use Bessel van der Kolk’s work (2014) as a foil and suggest that Judith Herman’s recent addition of the fourth stage of “justice” to her famous threefold stages of trauma recovery signals the need for recovering moral contexts in interdisciplinary trauma research. In van der Kolk’s terms, I suggest that while the body may be the “scoreboard” of trauma, it is the moral center (the “heart”) of a person that actually keeps that score.

 

I conclude the paper with implications for research in trauma theology, suggestions for greater collaboration between trauma theologians and moral injury researchers, and the moral imperative to focus trauma research on the testimony of survivors and their lived experience. Herman’s work signals an important advance in our understanding of the full scope of trauma and its impact on insights for human flourishing that should not be neglected by interdisciplinary trauma researchers and practitioners.

 

References

Herman, J. (2015). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.

 

Herman, J. (2023). Truth and Repair. New York: Basic Books.

 

Hill, P. (2023). Christ’s Body Keeps the Score: Trauma-Informed Theology and the Neuroscience of PTSD. TheoLogica, 7(1), 102–120.

 

Hill, P. (forthcoming). Holy Saturday and Trauma Theology. Cambridge University Press.

 

Jones, Serene (2009). Trauma and Grace. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. 

 

O’Donnell, Karen, and Katie Cross, eds. (2021). Feminist Trauma Theologies. London: SCM, 2021.

  

Rambo, Shelly (2010). Spirit and Trauma. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.

 

Rambo, Shelly (2017). Resurrecting Wounds. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

 

Leys, Ruth. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Mate, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. New York: Avery.

 

McNally, R. J. (2005). Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

   

Thompson, Deanna. Glimpsing Resurrection: Trauma, Cancer, and Ministry. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2018.

 

Van der Kolk, Bessel. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. New York: Penguin.

 

Young, A. (1995). The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.