In-der-Blog-sein

Robert D. Stolorow on dwelling with trauma.

Authentic existing presupposes a capacity to dwell in the emotional pain (grief, terror, horror, existential anxiety, etc.) that accompanies a non-evasive recognition of finitude, and this capacity, in turn, requires that such pain find a relational context in which it can be held.

What makes the finding of such an understanding context possible? An answer to this question can be found in a relational dimension of the experience of finitude itself. Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as siblings in the same darkness, deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional understanding within which devastating emotional pain can be held, rendered more tolerable, and eventually integrated. Our existential kinship-in-the-same-darkness is the condition for the possibility both of the profound contextuality of emotional trauma and of the mutative power of human understanding.

With Dylan song alluding to same, at the bottom.  ¶ 11:06 AM