At the beginning of the term in my ASTU class, we read the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Foer. This book follows a young boys journey through dealing with his father’s death in the incident of the September 11^th terrorist attacks. Throughout this book we are shown how young Oskar Schell copes with the frequently incomprehensible feelings brought on by what I hypothesized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Oskar’s narrative chapters when he becomes depressed or has feelings of sadness or guilt, Oskar’s abstract and childish mind interprets/ labels this state of mind as having “heavy boots”.

“I didn’t understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren’t wearing heavy boots, then you need help” (Foer 200).

This idea of children viewing this kind of emotion as a physical thing—making it hard for you to move (on) and weighing you down, restraining you from running and jumping as children tend to do—though abstract is an amazing representation of these hard to understand emotions. Does Oskar truly understand the feelings he is having and is just choosing to label them as that? Is his unconscious mind using this term to help him process these feelings and understand them in a less threatening way? This thought led me to generalize Oskar’s abstract coping mechanisms to the whole population of adolescents’. How do other children of his age group cope with their depressive feelings? Do they see them as physically as Oskar? According to Jean Piaget, a famous psychologist, children around Oskar’s age (9) have not yet learned to grasp the idea of abstract thinking and instead tend to approach unfamiliar situations or feelings by assimilating them into existing familiar schemas that they understand. He explains this as the “concrete operations stage” of development that occurs to normally developing children between the ages of 7-11. During this stage, children become logical, can solve problems and have a pretty stable grasp on reality. Children in this stage of development, though logical, seem to lack the skill of abstract thinking, and don’t begin to understand this complex action until ages 11-adulthood when they are in Piaget’s “formal operations stage” of development. Can we explain Oskar’s use of “heavy boots” as due to a stage in children’s cognitive development, or is it dependent on more? Does the way adolescent’s cope and interpret feelings also depend on the parenting style and frame that you were raised around?

All this examination of the way a fictional character and adolescents cope and interpret trauma lead me to wonder how differently we as individuals label and cope with feelings, and to be introspective, how my personal narrative frame in which I was raised impacts the way I deal with feelings and everyday events.

 Works Cited

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Boston, Mass.: Mariner, 2005. Print.

Lindsay, D. Stephen, and Delroy L. Paulhus. Psychology: The Adaptive Mind. 3rd Canadian ed. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2008. Print.

The past couple weeks my ASTU class has looked at several intriguing pieces of writing. Each has made me question even further the principle of trauma, morality and national/individual superiority. In the scholarly article, “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other”, Ilka Saal argues the term “trauma transfer”, which encourages the transferring of ones trauma, to another’s trauma to find similarities and hope in the relatability of such. While this is helpful in the sense of providing encouragement for groups of people dealing with loss in the context of support groups, the act of simply transferring ones trauma creates a series of problems.

Transferring or comparing two different traumas can desensitize the traumas, putting more weight and power on one, taking away from the importance of the other.

So then does that lead us to believe one person’s or our pain is greater than another’s? Simply transferring trauma is far to literal of a solution when dealing with the complex and unique spectrum in which each person experiences physical and mental pain. One cannot simply compare two traumatic situations and expect a helpful release from that. Instead I argue the use of acknowledging our, “shared vulnerability”. Judith Butler introduces this term in her book Frames of War. This entails the act of understanding not the physical and surface characteristics of ones trauma, but instead identifying with the feelings that have harbored in the person because of it. I reason that to successfully emphasize with another’s trauma, we must altogether forget about any physical components of the situation and furthermore simply embrace the feelings that this incident has invoked.

Following the theme of emphasizing trauma and recognizing a shared vulnerability, Butler shows us a real life example of this deficit in the world. Butler asks what superiority and responsibility the US has in enforcing their system of “democracy” on other countries that they believe need change? We see ourselves as heroes and we are “giving voices to the voiceless”, but instead of doing just that we are putting ourselves on our pedestal and perpetuating the gap of inequalities between them and us, moving further away for recognizing the vulnerability that we as humans all inevitably share. In regards to the recently published book based on Guantanamo Bay containing compilations of prisoner’s poetry, we must wonder how we can treat those who we see as “evil” with torturous punishments but still claim our spot as “protectors of the peace”. By committing these torturous acts as “superior Americans” does that not make us as equally immoral as the prisoners? In this case, we are letting go of the chance to acknowledge a shared humanity between us and the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, by labeling them as inhuman.

Parallel to this idea of the United States granting themselves a higher power to call the shots and judge all others who are not practicing the same traditions as us, who are we as individuals to believe we are anymore than another? Who are we to transfer our trauma to another’s and say that ours is more painful? The feelings we have and the reality we see is different than any others on the planet. Even when viewing the same event, we will all perceive it differently. Though this may seem lonely and incredibly isolating, we should instead see this as a gift. We ultimately control our lives. We are in charge of what we perceive and our affect from that—in a religious context, we are the gods of our personal worlds, and only our unique individual worlds. How can we step out of our own jurisdiction and govern over another’s experience and feelings?