The subject matter of the readings for this lecture were admittedly hard to swallow. The psychology of trauma in of itself is something that I had never really taken the time to question or explore, and that alone came with some baggage. However I was rather struck by the idea of tattoos as a way to process trauma because they allow for the sort of permanence the brain is looking for when attempting to understand and process traumatic events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It made me think of how when processing trauma, one is often trying to regain power over the event and how the most immediate sway to obtain this might seem to forget whatever happened and block it out. This however proves unproductive, and so counterintuitively: taking the agency to inscribe your own body with a memento of a traumatic event, allows for the brain to regain the control it is so desperately looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a lighter note, I decided to look for script tattoo examples for this lecture, drawing inspiration for my own friend who has dealt with some pretty traumatizing loss in her life and who decided to confront this loss by immortalizing a suicide letter into a tattoo. it is interesting to me that people insist on keeping the handwriting of their loved ones reflected in their tattoos. If I take a second to think about it, it makes sense with what Sarnecki was describing in her article about memory, and how painful stories require memory more than happy ones. It makes sense that people not only want the message their lost loved one gave them, but their inscription, the stylistic device of the lettering which says \u201cthis is you speaking, and I remember you\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The subject matter of the readings for this lecture were admittedly hard to swallow. The psychology of trauma in of itself is something that I had never really taken the time to question or explore, and that alone came with some baggage. However I was rather struck by the idea of tattoos as a way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17782"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":729,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728\/revisions\/729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}