This page provides a model for speaking of trauma based on Naoko Miyaji's ethnographic and clinical experiences mainly in Japan.

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It is often assumed that a person with more serious trauma has the right and ability to speak out. But those who are at the center of trauma and unable to survive cannot testify.

Based on this notion, a  ring-shaped island (RSI) model, shaped like a doughnut with a landlocked inner sea, is developed.

The voices come from the survivors on the inner slope and from the supporters on the outer slope of "gravity" for symptoms of trauma, "wing" for interpersonal conflicts, and "water level" for intelligibility of the speech and its social recognition.

It addresses the social construction of trauma and shows the relativistic nature of when and how some traumatic experiences are recognized.

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 ‘At a distance of years one can today definitely affirm

that the history of the Lagers has been written almost exclusively

by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom.

Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation

was paralyzed by suffering and incomprehension’

--Levi, 1988/89, p.17

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Clinical and social activity to raise awareness of unrecognized trauma can be analogized to a process of creating a RSI. By defying gravity and wind and lowering the water level,  they keep the voices of the traumatized from being silenced and allow their suffering to be alleviated.

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‘All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing’

 

--Herman, 1992/97, p.7

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*This article first appeared in "Violence and Victims," Volume 29, Number 1, 2014.

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