ABSTRACT
Something happens between us, between clinician and patient, something happens over time in treatment that takes such great effort to describe. Sometimes we do not even know that this is a particular experience to be described. The felt sense of trauma resonates through generations. Each of us brings into the therapeutic process memories that have fallen off the arrow of time; memories from our individual histories, embodied and dissociated memories from parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. The brilliantly talented, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie so beautifully states that to truly listen we must use our bodies as resonating chambers (Glennie 2007). But because our bodies are resonating chambers, we are always listening, with, or without, cognitive awareness. Intergenerational transmission of traumatic experience tells the story of information flow through our bodies which themselves are embedded in a resonant world. The stories that we hear and the stories that we feel shape a narrative history each one of us carries through life. Hidden within this narrative history is an epigenetic transformation of our selves. From generation to generation stress alters the very expression of our genes, so that ultimately it is possible to inherit the consequences of trauma without any stories, without conscious awareness of what came before. Understanding just a bit about the biophysics of communication and the molecular chemistry of epigenetics offers us an opportunity to listen beyond words. Translation from the biophysics of what we perceive to the cognitive meaning of what we know remains tricky and for that reason I hold as a mantra a byte from the poet Muriel Rukeyser:
Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
