Corporality and trauma

Abstract

In trauma, silence is broken in giving way to the lived body, but aspects related to corporality as the most frequently lived experience of the traumatic event are not always included. In this chapter we review the different dimensions of the suffering and emergence of trauma in holistic, gender-sensitive, and integrated ways. The body is the epicenter of trauma in its individual experience, impact on identity, and excruciating remembrance of the event. Yet sociopolitical contexts and their ruptures also inhabit the human body: violence, poverty, abuse, and oppression. Thus, understanding trauma requires giving specific attention to the sociocultural fabric in which the wound is inscribed and suffered. It means reviewing integrating models in which the diverse dimensions of suffering are considered, gathering the much-heralded but less frequently performed psychosocial approach to health. In the first part of this article we approach the sociocultural elements surrounding the experience of trauma, without detaching corporeality and its gendered embodied reality. In the second part of this article we approach the concept of trauma from a humanist perspective around the extensive disruption that occurs in identity and in corporeality. The psychopathological conditions that may emerge after a traumatic event are many and varied; even though we do not attempt to cover them all, we provide an approach to two of the expressions more frequently affected by gender: somatization and self-harm.