ABSTRACT
The last part of this book explores how phenomenology can help us develop an interconnected view of healing trauma. Because we have explored the interrelational structure of traumatic experience, we are now able to examine how it might be mended. In this chapter, we look at how the subjective experiences of trauma that were explored early on can provide these frameworks of healing. This involves defining what it really means to have ‘health’. In this analysis, phenomenology will ask us to confront definitions that are actually incommensurable with common experience. This means that in examining the possibility and limits of health, we will need to assess what is really required for someone to become whole. The chapter will also examine how healing requires recognising the multiple interconnections in human experience and addresses the importance and limits of theories concerning post-traumatic growth. It also assesses how trauma healing requires the transformation of social relationship. Reconnecting the interhuman relation means re-establishing patterns of trust and creating a space for the community to witness the trauma. In this chapter, we will look at how discourses around healing as consolation might offer helpful rebuttals to oversimplified theodicies, and the way in which lamentation can reconnect the client to the therapist through an experience of mediated suffering. It will require assessing accounts such as Kalsched’s psychoanalytic self-care theory. Finally, this chapter will suggest that the reconfiguration of social relationship requires that we mend systems of injustice that perpetuate the conditions for experiences of trauma in our communities, addressing challenges surrounding moral injury and the ambiguous experiences of perpetrators who are also victims. Phenomenology, in this respect, acts to hold each of these experiences together in the complex expression of being-in-the-world, alongside others.
