February 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Witnessing Transformation: A Review of Common Schock

Common Shock: Witnessing Violence -Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal, by Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., Dutton, 2003, $24.95.

Fred Marchant is the director of the
Creative Writing Program at Suffolk University in Boston. His latest book is House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems, from Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland.

What does it mean to be a witness to violence? What is the toll it takes on those who must bear witness? What are the possibilities for affirmation and transformation embedded within the role of witness? These are the fundamental questions that reside at the heart of clinical psychologist Kaethe Weingarten’s third book, Common Shock.

Weingarten’s premise is that the role of the witness is often underestimated. She asserts that witnessing needs to be central to our understanding of violence, whether on an individual or a national scale. "We are used to thinking about violence as a drama with two roles: the victim and perpetrator," writes Weingarten. "In fact," she continues, "in the majority of cases there is a drama with three positions: a victim, a perpetrator, and a bystander. The bystander, or witness, the term I prefer, may be present during the episode or may learn about it later…. In either case, the violence between the victim and perpetrator affects the witness as well." A witness might even be the victim or perpetrator who is later remembering his or her own actions. Witnessing is thus a more complicated matter than just observing or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. From Weingarten’s point of view, we need to understand the complexity of the witness’s experience in order to comprehend, ameliorate, and perhaps even transform the violence that surrounds us every day.

In Common Shock Weingarten draws upon years of work as a practicing clinical psychologist. She is a teacher at the Harvard Medical School and works as well at the Family Institute of Cambridge. An expert on psychological trauma, Weingarten is also the founder and the director of the Witnessing Project (www.witnessingproject.org) and has given presentations on witnessing violence in, among other places, South Africa, Kosova/o, and Northern Ireland. Common Shock—the phrase itself—is her name for the multitude of effects that often accompany being a witness to violence. She chose the word shock because a witness to violence will often experience a traumatic assault to body, mind, and spirit, an assault that is akin (though not identical) to that experienced by the direct victim of violence. She uses the word common because "the experience is widespread, it is collective, and it belongs to all of us."

A major component of this book is Weingarten’s exposition of the anguish that comes with being a witness to violence. She examines biologically-based responses, such as hypervigilance, as well as the emotional dislocations that some witnesses experience: numbness, anger, memory distortions, sadness, helplessness, and shame. She probes the isolation that often accompanies -witnessing something about which no one else seems to want to hear. Witnesses to violence often find that basic life-assumptions and belief systems are no longer tenable.

Despite all these difficulties, however, for Weingarten, witnessing is a "two-sided coin." While the one side is characterized by suffering, on the other side is the chance to mitigate the violence through an intentional, compassionate witnessing. The latter is, Weingarten argues, "the key to the transformation of violence in everyday life."

Weingarten’s conception of compassionate witnessing is bound up with her faith in the value of story-telling. "We must learn about and become familiar to each other," writes Weingarten, "so that we can tell each other’s story in a way that makes us each feel understood…. This is the essence of compassionate witnessing." The value of story-telling applies to victims and perpetrators alike. She proposes a kind of unspoken dialogue between story-teller and listener, making each a partner to the -other’s experience, even if the stories told are ones we might not necessarily enjoy or want to hear. The idea, she argues, is to turn everyday toxic witnessing into a witnessing that heals us individually, and has the capacity to heal our society.

Common Shock itself embodies Weingarten’s own high standards. In addition to its rich theoretical vein, the book is replete with stories of compassionate witnessing. She tells stories that are drawn from her own life, her practice, and her work in some of the most troubled regions of the world. When Weingarten offers the idea that compassion is a willingness to suffer with, the concept comes to vivid life as she tells the stories of how the McCarthy-era hearings so traumatized her whole family that the effect was felt long after in Weingarten’s own adult life. When the reader wonders how and if compassionate witnessing could work in a country recently traumatized by war and ethnic hatred, Weingarten describes her meeting with a gravedigger in Kosova/o. He was all by himself exhuming bodies from a mass grave, wanting to give each a proper burial. Weingarten tells him she will carry his story with her, and she has indeed done so in her book. These are but two examples out of many, but as a result of these stories, reading Common Shock is inspirational.

Despite the pain, the stories illustrate the transformative capacity of telling and listening. One can bear witness by telling the story of violence encountered, and one can bear witness by listening deeply to that story. In both dimensions we can recognize our shared humanity and feel some restoration of the bonds of connectedness that have been broken by force. In the end, Common Shock is one of those rare books that, through its own practical example, teaches how we all might live as peacemakers.

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