ABSTRACT
In the lm The Railway Man, based on a true story by Eric Lomax (1995) about his horric experiences of torture at the hands of Japanese soldiers during World War Two, one of the characters describes the long-lasting and devastating effects of trauma. “We’re not living,” he says, “we’re miming in the choir.” After harboring hateful thoughts of revenge for 50 years, Lomax nally confronts one of his tormentors and nds within himself a capacity to forgive and the conviction that “some time the hating has to stop” (p. 278). Although “miming in the choir” suggests an inability to live and love fully while haunted by past traumatic events, there is evidence in the Lomax story of what Calhoun and Tedeschi (2012) refer to as “post-traumatic growth.” Experts in the eld of trauma recovery (Herman, 1997; Harms, 2010; Rynearson, 2006) suggest that healing of these deep wounds can only begin when the past is confronted and when the trauma can be expressed in words or perhaps through images and in other creative ways. Emotional safety in a therapeutic relationship is regarded as a vital prerequisite for reconstruction of the trauma story. For Eric Lomax it was his second wife, Patti, who encouraged him to face his nightmarish past and to seek professional help from the UK organization now known as Freedom from Torture. This is the kind of growth to which Joseph (2012) refers when he says that “adversity, like the grit in the oyster that creates the pearl, is often what propels people to become more true to themselves, take on new challenges and view life from a wider perspective” (p. xii).
