Bearing Witness is Secondary Trauma that Needs Healing Too

Why it's a mistake and deflection to hold reporters more accountable than the actual perpetrator

I could easily turn today’s post into a political one. Everything here applies to what’s happening in our country. But I’ve pulled inward in recent weeks, caring for myself during a dysregulating time. Before I’m a citizen, I’m a human—one that comes from a high-control background, still detangling the ways that high-control impacts me. Today’s post reflects my personal journey: What should I do about what I saw?

Someone recently asked me if witnessing trauma is as bad as experiencing it. My first reaction was a decisive “no.” Then, my mind flipped through the times it wasn’t so clean-cut as “yes” or “no.” It’s different. Sometimes, witnessing is your experience, and while it’s different from the direct recipient, it’s valid on its own. If you’re traumatized by what you saw, that’s between you and your nervous system, not you and another person.

Over the years of my recovery, I’ve learned from myself and other survivors that it’s not unusual for abuse victims to dissociate from the first-person narrative of their own lives. We are the best active listeners! We empathize so profoundly that it feels like we’re seeing your experience along with you. We see beyond ourselves, from within ourselves, and detach from our reactions and reflections on what we record. And sometimes, that’s a problem.

It was an aha-moment when I discovered dissociation isn’t restricted to primary traumatic experiences. As survivors in recovery, we discover a fight for our voices, names, narratives, and visibility—a battle that’s fought within—and may entail speaking up about what we saw, versus what was directly done to us.

One of my growth edges is embodying the right to take up space, to be present in my life and experiences, and to know my viewpoint is worthy of representation in my own mind and memory. If you’re saying, of course, to this, you might be surprised to learn that self-presence is a struggle for those who come from a culture of silence. We’re missing from ourselves, sometimes in lasting ways that cause us a struggle to “be here,” present in our lives, reliable narrators of what we see, hear, touch, smell, feel, and remember.

The Culture of Silence

Where we’re from, in high-control religion, what someone else thinks is always more important than what we lived or saw. Add to this the religious doctrines of deference, self-sacrifice, self-denial, toxic positivity, and spiritual bypassing. Those attempting to deconstruct long-held beliefs may find they’re absent characters in the movies of their lives, invisible and subservient, even in their memories, dreams, and nightmares. This is especially true if we witnessed abuse: our job is to be quiet, lest we be gossips and what American minister and author John MacArthur calls “obsessed.”

“Do not talk or even think about the wrongs done against you because it serves no productive purpose.” John MacArthur

Silence was overtly and covertly taught in my religious background. A recent reminder came through social media when “@iblamebill” Rachel Cain shared an example of how victims are shamed when they tell the truth about what happened to them.

iblamebill

A post shared by @iblamebill

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” is repeated so often in Christian settings that attributing a source sounds more like listing the choir members.

Less religiously, what about appropriation? When is the story not ours to tell, and does our silence offer an essential space for someone else to share their firsthand experience?

Silence is useful….to someone. Sometimes, the best way to tell if silence is helpful or harmful is to notice who’s empowered by it. Is your silence benefiting the perpetrator? Or is your silence protecting the harmed?

Unless our silence is strategic and a choice of our own volition, we risk enabling toxic power. When we share our stories, we bring awareness. We flip the light on in darkened rooms, and we shift the burden of responsibility onto the shoulders of those who abuse, relieving survivors so they can breathe.

But the burden of bearing witness is not as clear as the fingers in our innermost parts, as it is the bruises on our skin. Were we harmed? Was it bad enough? Are we making mountains? Attention seeking? Misrepresenting? What is our place? What is our story to tell?

I’ve worked hard on deconstruction concepts like accurately naming experiences, breaking down harmful dogma, identifying root theology, decolonizing, divesting, and challenging old narratives. My primary traumas are significant (Intimate Partner Violence, rape, severe medical events, emotional, psychological, financial, and spiritual abuse). However, the one I still struggle most with is what I bore witness to—the violence and abuse I watched happen, which either makes me complicit, indirectly responsible, or a victim of secondary abuse. It’s usually all three.

I know this, too, is common among survivors: one of the first things we learn in Christian Patriarchy is to participate, which causes us to perpetuate the system so that we eventually become perpetrators ourselves. Gradually, believing we’re in the right because of what we were taught or too traumatized to do anything else, we become someone else’s bad guy. Awakenings come slowly. And, when we truly realize and fathom the part we played in someone else’s pain, it breaks our already broken hearts.

The Survivor’s Triad

The weight of survival is a complicated chord: you are a victim, heroine, and guilty of… something. Root, third, and fifth of the scale. If your healing journey is anything like mine, you’ll deal with each note one at a time, and it will be years before you can hold the whole, resounding truth that these are all true simultaneously. Holding it may still hurt, like the ache of an adagio in a minor key.

Something happened to you.

You did something about it.

You did something to someone else.

This weight-bearing is why I began to write. I needed to expel and express what I could not sort or contain. The page offered breathing room and a measure of safety as I did what felt so dangerous to attempt: tell.

Then, show and tell.

Then, show someone what you wrote.

Just like the traumas themselves, relief didn’t happen all at once.