On the day my story about the kidnapping of Jack Teich published online, I woke up at 5 a.m. from the fever dream that plagues me the night before any publication — trust me, you don’t want to know — and confirmed that it was up. I considered heading back to bed, but I noticed that my email inbox was filling. Really, really filling. Within an hour I had a hundred new messages; by noon, hundreds more. Any journalist will tell you that this is a terrifying prospect, that it usually means you’re in some sort of trouble. I began to open them with one hand over my eyes.
The story was originally just about Teich — a family friend of mine who was kidnapped at gunpoint 50 years ago, in 1974 — but as the article began its discussion of trauma, I chose to elucidate what I was seeing in him by sharing a traumatic experience of my own: the 2007 birth of my older son. I used my story to illustrate the overlap in trauma as a condition, that it didn’t matter so much the circumstances as the state a person is left in when something goes wrong. Some of the emails were from people who knew the Teiches and law enforcement who worked on the case, but most of them were about the intertwining of the stories. Most of them praised it; two different ones told me I had embarrassed myself and ruined my son’s life both in telling the story and being traumatized by what turned out to be a healthy birth. (I hold special affection for those two!)
But almost all of the emailers also included another story: their own. Email after email contained a kind of testimony, the simple reiteration of a time when things went wrong for them, like my son’s birth — like Jack’s kidnapping. The stories were about anything from a dental procedure gone wrong to an abusive relationship to a gang rape. There were kidnappings, yes, but also parents’ divorces and car accidents. The notes were short and long. They were brisk and confessional. They were heartfelt and in Comic Sans font.
There were so many of them that eventually I had to stop reading, unable to do what they were asking me to do, though I wasn’t sure what that was yet. Two weeks before, I went away for a weekend with Dr. Lydia P. Ogden, who happens to be a trauma therapist and a professor of social work at Salem State University in Massachusetts. (We are old friends, but, yes, I travel with a trauma therapist and highly recommend it.) During our trip, we met a doctor who, hearing Lydia’s job title, wondered aloud if “trauma” was now an overused word. As I sat reading those emails, I started wondering if it was actually underused.
And then there were the comments. From the day the story published, my colleagues at The Times asked me if I had been reading the comments on the story, but I couldn’t bring myself to wade into them. The emails were hard enough — I wasn’t done with them, and I felt they all deserved to be read in a sacred state. But I watched as the number of comments grew; something in me was so exhausted from the course the story took that if they were anything like the emails, I couldn’t bear them.
Then, on election night, as I awaited the returns, I moused over to my story and decided to finally read the comments. I scrolled through them, and I read all of them, all the testimony. One person who had kept asking me if I’d seen them was Jack’s eldest son, Marc, who had been so moved by them. He told me that the isolation of his childhood, of believing that no one else would understand what happened to his father and how it hung over their family, was its own trauma — the trauma of believing that your suffering is unique. Whereas I recognized my own suffering in Jack’s story — as I say in the piece, all trauma eventually rounds down to looking pretty much the same — Marc was astounded by the number of kidnappings mentioned in the comments section. (Now, kidnapping is a pretty rare crime, but it seems to affect the Times readership disproportionately. If you can read this, stay safe out there!)
My point is that Marc read through them and realized that while his experience was, yes, rare, it wasn’t uniquely so. There were other people out there who had been through what he had been through, other families that were never the same, other people who knew you could just be walking around somewhere when someone else’s bad intentions were unleashed upon you and you never saw the world exactly the same again.
That November night, I returned to the emails, ready to start replying to them. But it was reading them again that made me understand that they were never asking anything of me in the first place. Most of them, in fact, told me that no response was necessary. They were simply asking me to be the recipient of someone’s story.
“I think this speaks to narrative theory and practice,” Lydia told me later. “The idea that being human is being storied. Our identities are built on the stories told about us and that we tell about ourselves and experiences. And healing comes from re-storying our self-narratives and importantly, also, from sharing them: We need our stories to be witnessed in order to heal.”
The role I played — the role you played if you read the comments, too — was one of what Lydia tells me is called “outsider witnessing.” I had created for the reader a person capable of witnessing a traumatic narrative, of listening to it, and those people who had seen me bear witness to Jack’s story, to my own as well, knew that to tell me what happened to them would be to tell someone who saw it as her job to hold it and share in its burden. Meaning, the emails didn’t ask anything of me beyond receiving them — which I did, and which is good, because I still haven’t found a way to respond to them, though it is nearly half a year later and I still think about them all the time.
The post I Published a Story About Trauma. I Heard About Everyone Else’s. appeared first on New York Times.
