a person may choose not to remember and/or succumb to the traumatic event because the acknowledgment of it may be just as traumatizing if not more traumatizing then actually living through it.At, “the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others” people still often have a ‘collapse of witnessing’ regardless of the fact that they themselves did not physically experience the event (Laub 75). The person listening to the testimony has the challenge of being, “part of the struggle to go beyond the event and not be submerged and lost in it” (Laub 76). This is difficult because the person that is listening to another person relive their traumatic experience is actually reliving the event with them. As difficult as it is for the physical witness to relive their event and attest to being a, “witness within the experience” the listener has to be a witness of the testimony of another (Laub 75). Caruth says, “the challenge of [for] the therapeutic listener … is how to listen to the departure” and, “to listen to the crisis of a trauma, that is, is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it” (Caruth 10). Both people are subject to the ‘collapse of witnessing’. Neither wants to believe the truth of the event or attempt to incorporate it into the realm of their social. Both are struggling to surrender to the trauma and the telling of the trauma and moving past the event. At the third level of witnessing there is yet another opportunity for the ‘collapse of witnessing’ to take place. At the third level of witnessing both the physical witness and the witness of the testimony are working together to find a Truth. Laub says, “the traumatic experience has normally long been submerged and has become distorted in its submersion” (Laub 76). The Truth that is trying to be ...
