tiple and uncontrollable orgasms were traumatic for Teresa on many levels. However, Teresa did not realize the effect of these ‘favours’ until after they had stopped. Teresa said, “from that day onwards I have looked on everything that is not directed to God’s service as vanity and lies” (Teresa 306). It took Teresa many years to be a ‘witness’ to the events that had taken place in her life and to come to the realization that she must devote her life to God. There was a ‘collapse of witness’ because of how traumatic God’s ‘favours’ were for her. In addition, Teresa’s followers and disciples of the church had to endure ‘witnessing’ Teresa’s trauma as well. Those that witnessed what was happening to Teresa both seeing it and hearing about it had to endure not being able to incorporate these experiences into their social. The other people of the church experience the, “the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others” (Laub 75). These followers and disciples of Teresa and the church had to endure living through the telling and the ‘witnessing’ of Teresa’s traumatic experiences. The inability to master the concept of what was happening to St. Teresa caused these ‘others’ to have a ‘collapse of witnessing’ in regards to hearing the testimony of Teresa and her experiences. Teresa’s faced the actual ‘witnessing’ of her trauma throughout the writing of her autobiographical text. It was when she wrote the text itself that she first realized, to the extent, what she had experienced. This is similar to Ota Yoko. Ota also was forced to realize the trauma of the atomic bomb through her writing. Ota had a missed experience, in the sense that she did not realize the effects of the bomb until she realized that she could not adequately write about it. She was forced...
