Living beside...

Tanya Lewis (1999) offers a reconceptualization of the impact of violence which allows for moving away from medicalizing the impact of violence and shifts from discourses that suggest there can be a place of having "dealt with" trauma. The conceptualization of a journey from sickness to health puts impossible demands on survivors of trauma. When they are expected to put their experiences behind them and "get over it," pressure mounts to do so, or at least to appear to have done so.

Lewis offers an alternative conceptualization that contrasts with the medical model of sickness and healing, the image of "living beside the violation." She asserts that the experiences of trauma "live on" and suggests a new frame, "familiarity with violence:"

Living beside the violation becomes much more possible if I understand myself as someone who is familiar with violence rather than someone whose life experience is pathologized. My familiarity with violence contributes to my knowledge, my sense of strength and my capacity for empathy rather than as something tainted with pathology that must be overcome. (Unpublished presentation, 1998)(8)

Though medical diagnoses can be reassuring (and sometimes useful(9)) to a person who has experienced trauma, they can also be a trap, identifying a sickness to be cured, leading to self-blame or blame from others, when she is not cured fast enough, cannot leave the pain behind, get on with "normal" life again and learn successfully. This trap can be particularly acute in literacy. The experience of taking part in a literacy program can potentially explore possibilities of living beside trauma. But, if literacy workers have learned the medicalizing and pathologizing discourses well, then workers and learners will seek to show they have left violence and its impacts behind or risk the judgement they are not "ready" to be there.

(8) These concepts were articulated by Tanya Lewis as part of her thesis defence - I thank her for the tremendous insight of such metaphors for enabling a vision outside medicalizing discourses. (9) Thanks to Nicole Ysabet-Scott for her insights about how a student can use medical diagnoses to bargain concessions from the academic system which may make it easier to gain entry or achieve success within the formal academic system.