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Abstract
This short essay represents an edited version of a larger work-in-progress article regarding the crucial role of storytelling, listening, and acknowledgment when working with survivors of trauma and abuse.
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment sought and given in the moment of storytelling and story-listening between survivors is not the superficial act of mere recognition but is representative of Hyde’s (Citation2006) notion of acknowledgment – requiring a continued openness to the other such that the “ethos of acknowledgment establishes an environment wherein people can take the time to ‘know together’” (Hyde, Citation2006, p. 3). Hyde describes genuine acknowledgment as “life-giving” and so crucial that, without it, “we are destined to exist in ways that are marked by the loneliness of social death” (Hyde, Citation2007, p. 106). For survivors, acknowledgment has the potential to bring affirmation or anxiety, depending upon how it is approached and given.
Lipari (Citation2010) extends acknowledgment into the realm of listening by noting that “the presence of acknowledgment presupposes the presence of listening,” reminding us that in this way, “listening becomes a prior ethical act” (Lipari, Citation2010, p. 349) in the fulfillment of acknowledgment. Through Lipari’s perspective, we are able to parallel the terms “acknowledgment” and “listening” to arrive at the possible conclusion that without the life-giving gift of listening, we are destined to exist in loneliness, and the very ethics of relationship vis-à-vis acknowledgment of the other rests upon the initial willingness of one to listen to the other. In engagement with individual survivors of abuse, this combined concept of acknowledgment and listening is particularly salient.
Many of the women I have worked with have, for years, alternated between being unacknowledged by their abusers, family members, and society in general and having their presence acknowledged by their abusers in a superficial sense and extremely violent way. Because of a survivor’s troublesome history with acknowledgment, to listen to a survivor is not only an ethical dialogic response in the moment of engagement, but to listen to her story opens a way for the survivor to become anew. Arneson (Citation2014) explains, “in telling one’s story, a person is always entwined with her self-identity (the ‘I can’) of bodily intentionality and motility as well as the immediate and distanciated involvement of others” (Arneson, Citation2014, p. 28). Arneson points her readers to the power of self-narrative to lead to, or facilitate, change by allowing the teller, upon each recounting of her narrative, to reimagine, re-evaluate, and interrogate (possibly for the first time) different traditions and ways of being-in-the-world.
In the context of interpersonal communication between a survivor and an other, it is in listening without judgment to the survivor’s story that a much-needed community of empowerment and safety can be formed relationally. For all humans, it is “the need to be known, to have our experience understood and accepted by someone who listens [that] is food and drink to the human heart” (Nichols, Citation2009, p. 1). Every experience of having her story listened to allows a survivor, isolated as she has often been in the abuse, to move from being a secluded individual in crisis to being part of a community of others who acknowledge the survivor’s being. Such acknowledgment allows the survivor to understand herself as a subject, not an object, as one who has spoken and been heard.