Recovery from trauma depends on willing listeners, not just the survivor’s words.

Evidence

“In order to construct self-narratives,” notes Susan Brison discussing victims of rape and torture, “we need not only the words with which to tell our stories but also an audience able and willing to hear us and to understand our words as we intend them. This aspect of remaking a self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are unwilling [or unable?] to listen to what they endured.” The ability to live sanely after a traumatic experience of pain is always dependent on the responses of others. Pain, one might venture, is neither a brute reality undermining thought nor an interpretation that is the occasion of ideological or scientific elaboration. It can be an active, practical relationship inhabiting time. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Asad’s formulation that pain is ‘neither a brute reality undermining thought nor an interpretation’ is near-identical in structure to how he later deconstructs the secular/religious binary—a both-and-neither third path. Relevant to testing the Cooper parallel.