Becoming Human
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you would not be their slaves, and I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. Leviticus 26:13 NASB
Walk erect – Traumatic events fragment personality. When we experience something that violates our basic awareness of the continuity of the world, psychic development is arrested. We stop growing in that particular area even if we continue to mature in other ways. Something stops. As a result, the trauma continues. Not cognitively. Not as an integrated part of life, but as fragments, flashbacks and emotional “feelings” that can’t quite be articulated and certainly cannot be integrated. The sense of self is fractured. What is absolutely necessary is a process or event that reorganizes the self so that these traumatic experiences can become part of a continuing story; a story about my life or your life that recognizes the past discontinuity as something that happened in the past but is no longer a present reality. As van der Kolk notes, “Our sense of Self depends on being able to organize our memories into a coherent whole.”[1]
If we read the biblical story of the exodus from this perspective, we discover that God is providing a psychic integration for an entire people. The trauma of slavery, an experience that indelibly marks successive generations, is integrated into a coherent story, a story with a beginning and an ending. The cultural psyche of Israel, stamped by generations of slavery in Egypt, is reoriented. The horror becomes the fertile ground of national autonomy and personal independence. Now, after the story, we can remember what happened as a turning point in the past, not a continuing emotional barricade to maturity. Van der Kolk points us in the right direction when he writes, “Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.”[2] Of course, communicating fully is not merely a rational, verbal action. Most human communication occurs in other ways.
This verse uses the Hebrew olek qomemiyyut. Translated “walk erect,” it is more literally, “go upright,” which can have both physical and spiritual connotations. The root, qum, is usually about the physical action of rising up, but we can easily see that God may have much more than that in mind. A people who have experienced the subservience of slavery need more than the ability to symbolically stand tall. They need a change in their worldview. They need to know why what has happened to them fits into what will happen to them. Perhaps the reason God is constantly reminding His people that He is the one who broke their bonds and lifted them out of subjection is that the people need to know that the trauma is over. And perhaps the reason they continue to retreat to idolatry is because the psychic reality of trauma isn’t over for them. What if we read this story, not as theology or religion, but as healing—healing for an entire culture that needed to incorporate horrific events into a coherent story? And what would happen to our stories if we also became a part of this integration?
Topical Index: walk upright, olek qomemiyyut, trauma, Leviticus 26:13
[1] Bessel ver der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, p. 249.
[2] Ibid., p. 237.
Meaningful history of the human race. Coming out of Egypt is a lifelong Quest. Fractured world, fractured emotions a reality for sure. A bone the place takes pain to put it back back pain continues for a while negative emotions have the same pull but, the reality Christ in US our hope of glory to be a continual status shalom
In the book The Body Bears The Burden, Dr. Scaer explores why football players can suffer collisions several magnitudes more forceful than a small traffic collision and not end up with whiplash or concussion, while another person can become debilitatingly injured by a five mile an hour rear ender. He concluded that it had to do with the MEANING associated with the event, and not the event itself. The football players were associating meanings relating to a PURPOSE: winning, and they were also actively participating (choosing), as opposed to helplessly suffering. This meant that they were reacting with a ‘normal’ response of flight or fright, and thus processing the events as they occurred, with no ‘extra’ meaning attached.
The fender bender victims, on the other hand, were passively enduring events beyond their choice or control, but even that was not the real key, for only a relatively small percentage of people were ending up becoming debilitated by these traffic accidents. What was the common denominator? He found that, without exception, these people had all had earlier trauma events that had not been resolved – in other words, had appropriate meanings associated with them. Further, these events had been experienced as helpless, frozen victims. In other words, instead of going into flight or fright (which is our normal response to trauma) they had gone into something he learned to call FREEZE (condition of helpless horror), which is a condition where you perceive you have NO CHOICES. Slaves experience this, as well as people who are about to die, and in the place of no choice, we learn something called “learned helplessness”, and we associate the meaning of DEATH to this no-choice place.
He concludes that people whose bodies and psyche have ‘learned’ freeze (I-am-about-to-die) at some point in the past will be much more likely to react that way in the future. The reaction of freeze typically occurs with an event that is perceived as overwhelming and as having NO MEANING (purpose), or, relevant association with anything previous to it. This is much more likely to happen in childhood, as children are more likely to perceive an event this way. When this happens to us, we end up assigning the meaning of DEATH to the feeling of helplessness and horror, and the mind and body accordingly react as though we are about to die.
This also affects PTSD sufferers. Studies suggest that these victims were ‘primed’ for a future stress reaction to trauma by unresolved trauma in the past, for the mind and body automatically assign the ‘meaning’ of past events – they ‘trigger’ their previous reaction to trauma – with the current event, even though it may be a much more minor event. This means that the MEANING associated with the event is going to determine how you actually experience the event, and not the event itself. This is revolutionary knowledge for our understanding of why we go into stress responses as well as why they affect us.
The meaning (history) of the past determines HOW we experience the present. It really does!
Laurita, I couldn’t agree more. It seems to me that our nation could benefit tremendously from grasping this truth. I’ll go out on a limb and say that when we are able, in the present, to perceive a DIFFERENT meaning than we originally perceived, to a past experience, healing begins. It changes our future because at a certain level, it has changed our past. Perception = Reality.
As a descendant of slavery here in America, and having first hand experience of the trauma it has had on multiple generations of my people, I can’t even put into words how this TW speaks to the core of me!
wow- His- Story=my story=your story=????
Exquisitely rendered. Consider, YHVH presented himself to Isreal to be revealed to the world for who He is not what we think Him to be.