From »I« to »We«: Trauma, Empathy, Memory

»How do we talk about war, violence and hatred? How do we protect ourselves from repeated injuries? Are there spaces for empathy to process traumatic events?« these and other questions are at the center of a panel discussion at Internationales Literatur Festival Berlin I was invited to join as a speaker this September. The topics, all perfectly matching my own train of thought of both a writer in exile and a witness of unprecedented repressions ongoing in my home country, offered a space for reflection that I decided to navigate through–also in writing.

For me, as a linguist, the idea of sharing starts with the pronouns used in self-presentation. And there was something curious that I noticed while doing research on the memory vocabulary as a part of my work on »The Art of (Not) Forgetting« project. When speaking about the most resourceful and most traumatic recollections our language differs: in the accounts of sad episodes, we tend to use more of the »I«-pronoun, whereas bright memories were rather presented as »we«-experiences. It looks like we feel lonely in the face of betrayal or abuse, death or injustice, whereas happiness is something we naturally enjoy with the close ones.

So yes, trauma is associated with introspection.

When in emotional pain, we frequently turn inward, engaging in deep reflection and rumination in attempts to make sense of our experiences. And as the first step towards healing, psychological science argues,

we need to deal with this hyperfocus on oneself, move from »I« to »we« and try to overcome speechlessness.

Sharing trauma can be done in different ways: via narrative and storytelling (in individual or group therapy), through art expression as a means of opening oneself up to others for collective witnessing and validation, and as a part of commemorative practices. Engaged in such activities, we could really feel the famous »no man is an island« state, as John Donn sensed it in 1624, precisely four centuries ago.

»Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main«. As easy as that: none of our most horrible sufferings is personally unique.

In the moments of pain, it might be hard to believe but there are thousands of unfamiliar and distant others who face and feel the same we do. And millions shared the same or similar concerns in past. Thus, embracing trauma’s non-uniquenessand acknowledging the common past of suffering is the key–both as a search for validation and (in more »pragmatic« terms) as a way to avoid, or minimize, the risk of repetition.

Keeping our eyes and hearts open–whatever cliched it may sound–we have bigger chances of addressing our own victimhood narcissism and moving towards a healthier self-esteem and healing: not only of ourselves but also of societies we live in.

In the 20th century alone, my home country Belarus survived five periods of occupation: that of the Russian Empire before 1917, of the Nazis and of the Soviets–decades succeeding each other until the collapse of the USSR. And, thinking back about the generations of our great-grandparents and grandparents, one could hardly imagine how much trauma they had to struggle with.

18 million Soviet citizens went through the GULAG, every fourth Belarusian was murdered by the Germans and their collaborators. People got kidnapped from their homes at night by NKVD, they died of malnutrition and diseases realted to unhealthy diet. After the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, death rate peaked due to radation exposure. Someone born in 1905, like my great-grandmother Pelageya Serebrjakova, by their mid-40s, could have lived under three occupations and witnessed famine, mass shootings, arrests and public executions–all within one course of human life.

But the question is–how much and how exactly could our ancestors share their painful experiences: be engaged in non-judgmental storytelling, free art expression, and genuine commemorative practices, as trauma healing supposes?

Anyone raised in post-Soviet bloc will know the answer. Instead of openly confronting the pain of the past, the trauma was buried, smothered under layers of state propaganda, mythologization and enforced silence. The Soviet era, with its dominating and ideologically beneficial narratives of heroic victories and glorious futures, left little room for acknowledging the deep scars left by war, famine, political purges, betrayal and confusion caused by the occupational regimes that changed with horrific speed.

The violent scenes that generation had to see and live through were shared in whisper in kitchens, or shouted out, uncontrolled, in nightmares. Much was subconsciously transferred to new generations–those of our parents, and later us–unprocessed and never fully integrated into the collective consciousness in a way that allowed for healing.

Collective trauma repression cannot but have profound consequences. In a society where trauma is not acknowledged, there is little room for empathy or solidarity–instead of those a culture of fear, mistrust, and passivity will be perceived as a norm, with those few critical minds who dared to question it getting stigmatized or ridiculed by the majority and punished by the authoritarian state. One of the most recent examples–the death of anti-Lukashenko artist Ales Pushkin. Famous for his sharp ironic statements that caused him numerous detentions and eventually a five-years’ sentence, the activist died on July 11, 2023 in the prison in Grodno in western Belarus of an unknown cause, that most probably had to do with medical negligence and inhumane conditions of imprisonment.

Among other Belarusians whose actions could be described as a contribution into trauma documentation and sharing–done through visual art and writing–we can certainly recall »the grandmother of Belarusian performance« Ljudmila Rusova. Belarusian dissident and the author of novels about World War II Vasil Bykau, the Nobel Prize Laureate Svetlana Alexievich and others. The subjects raised in their work range from collecting first-person accounts of the witnesses of large-scale tragedies in Alexievich’s books to personal trauma processing offered in the universal visual code, that erased the boundaries of »self« by Rusova. Today it is hard to estimate the impact such solitary figures had in stimulating the appearance and development of local communities that had intellectual and emotional sharing among their goals. But one thing was clear–in 2020, when thousands took up to the streets to rally against the rigged elections and brutality, the protest was also against the decades of fear, mistrust and inaction. Scattered and silent »I«s became the impressive endless ocean of »we«s. We all saw it.

What followed then–arrests, violence, torture, and new rounds of dissent crackdown–that’s another story. But the role of unshared trauma in making the blunt violence possible for me is undeniable. Police, judges, police station workers, white-collar employees of courts and other public structures are also Belarusians, those classic »ordinary people« from Hannah Arendt books on the banality of evil and their decisions as well as actions echo the repressive tactics of the Soviet past. And in them we see not just a continuation of old patterns but also a product of a society that has not come to terms with its history.

Fear, mistrust, and passivity have not gone anywhere–they are still silently present in the sentences the judges pronounce in closed hearings of courts where no-name »witness« against their neighbors, in job offers accepted by underqualified specialists to fill in the vacancies of those in jail, in career opportunities welcomed in the labor market understaffed due to the forced exile of half a million Belarusians.

But no man is really an island/Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main–we have seen it all before because that was also the heavy social climate our grandparents were living in.

Nevertheless, I do believe in the difference that lies between us today and the generation of our ancestors. We are still here, we have more knowledge about trauma healing mechanisms, and we have more sharing tools to create and strengthen our communities. And it is in our power to voice up not only to the stories of our 1 377 political prisoners but also to those of our own grandparents who survived through the turbulent 20th century. Those killed in Kurapaty forest in the late 1930s or starved to death in the GULAG camps can still talk, just like those serving politically-charged sentences in today’s prisons for having clear conscience and taking a courageous stance–but it is our duty to make them heard across the globe in search for solidarity.

I want to believe that we are able to break the circle, cultivate empathy and share. Belarus is now repeating its past–but what about Europe?

»Hurt people can inadvertently hurt and damage others. In order to raise well-loved, securely attached, confident, autonomous, and empathetic children, we need to reeducate ourselves. By promoting introspection and self-reflection, we can become psychological sleuths, sifting our past for clues as to why we are who we are. Otherwise, self-deception conceals complex emotions like self-loathing, envy, rage, shame, and humiliation, all readily cast off and projected into innocents via bullying and scapegoating. I believe these unassimilated emotions comprise the rudimentary precursors to evil itself. In the best of circumstances, my field can help prevent victims from becoming perpetrators; children from growing into hateful, murderous adults, and ordinary people from turning a blind eye

to the victimization of their fellow human beings.«

Jacqueline Heller, MD, the daughter of Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, a Holocaust survivor who »emphatically added suffix «who survived Hitler once and Stalin twice”