Metaphors transfer meaning between domains of experience.
To understand and engage another’s internal world requires language which speaks in harmony with the unconscious. Metaphor speaks beyond ego and traverses the realms between past and present, bodily sensation and feeling, conscious and unconscious. It infuses lived experience with connection and creates shared space for healing.
[Carl Gustav] Jung says, “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.”
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EZRA KLEIN: You have this very powerful line in the book from the writer Jessica Stern where she says, quote, “Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative. Mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does — it interrupts the plot.” Tell me a bit about how trauma interrupts the plot.
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well, trauma is really a wound that happens to your psyche, to your mind, to your brain. Suddenly you’re confronted with something that you are faced with horror and helplessness. That nothing prepares you for this and you go like, oh, my God.
And so something switches off at that point in your mind and your brain. And the nature of trauma is that you get stuck there. So instead of remembering something unpleasant, you keep reliving something very unpleasant.
So the job of overcoming trauma is to make it into a memory where your whole being knows this happened a long time ago, it’s not happening right now. But the nature of traumatic stress is that you keep reacting emotionally and physiologically as if these events are happening right now.
For a few moments, the double doors of the BART train to Berkeley remain open to the sunlit San José afternoon. I’m content to wait, lulled into a reverie by the railcar’s idle hum. My gaze wanders the faded foothills to the east and I drift back to the whisper.
I heard it as a young volunteer on the windswept Altiplano of Bolivia, watching Aymara women sit together on the dry grass, babies bundled on their backs. In dialogue spoken and unspoken, they pondered the health of their community, stirring a critical consciousness, Paulo Freire’s conscientização.
I heard it as a troubled student in Dr. P’s consulting room in Cambridge. Behind the couch where I lay wrung out and wobbly, solace in a soft Bronx accent: These things never go away, but they can be transformed. And you can survive them.
The whisper. The Marianist clergy at my high school might have called it a calling.
I’ve heard it through many seasons of my life, in marriage and divorce, health and illness, faith and betrayal, birth and death. I’ve heard it while I wore one coat or another, as tutor, organizer, actor, communicator, director, all honorable garments that secured me a living but none that rounded true to my shoulders.
My fellow traveler: The whisper is the sacred gift, if you trust me, of journeying into the country of You.
What stories are told in Your country? Are they sung from open windows? Kept muzzled in the cellar? In the country of You, how is the climate? The waters? The lands? What might we find if we turn over Your soil with gentle hands? What veiled forces make Your sun rise and turn the stars in Your night sky?
And I, a strange visitor to Your country, who am I to You? What do we make of our differences? How are we the same? How might We be together to kindle Your healing and Your hope?
Matthew M. Sholler, Psy.D. 
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