When Complex Trauma is Writ Small: Sue Miller's "Monogamy"

When people think about trauma, they tend to think big: war, sexual abuse, domestic violence, profound neglect. Trauma means “wound," and the wounds most often associated with it are huge and visible.

But another form of trauma exists, which we can think of as micro-trauma; it is interpersonal and often invisible to those outside the family circle. Such trauma consists of a lack of recognition, support, and validation. Peter Fonagy has shown that children need to have their feelings and thoughts accurately reflected to show that someone has taken their perspective and understands their interiority. They need such mirroring to develop the ability to take others’ perspectives and to regulate their own affect.

Simon Baron-Cohen has similarly argued that receiving empathy—having one’s thoughts and feelings understood—is the ground of secure attachment and social intelligence. Lack of validation of the true self leads to psychological problems, according to D. W. Winnicott. A child can have enough to eat, a safe place to live, and parents who truly love them and yet still suffer this kind of trauma.

At its worst, this less flagrant kind of trauma is the stuff of personality disorders, as James Masterson argues. But more often, this layered and subtle form of neglect leads to poor self-esteem and insecurity. Nadine Macoluso observes, “nurturing deficits” which are caused by a lack of validation from the parents or lack of feeling heard, seen, and understood” can “cause us to feel unworthy of love and insecure in our relationships with others and ourselves.”

The benchmark measure for mental disorders in DSM-5 is frequently impairment in social or occupational functioning, and this kind of complex trauma generates just this kind of impairment. People have difficulty with relationships, or they do not fulfill their potential or their goals. Is this as bad as the trauma that results from years of childhood sexual abuse? Are hierarchies of pain useful? As a brilliant teen client of mine observed, “If I have one broken leg and you have two broken legs, does it mean that I’m not in pain?

Another sad little girl.

Source: Luci Correia from Jaboatão dos Guararapes/ Wikimedia

No one portrays this subtle form of domestic (and domesticated) trauma better than the novelist Sue Miller, one of the most nuanced chroniclers of emotion writing today. Her novel Monogamy focuses on the protagonist Annie's discovery of her charismatic, larger-than-life husband’s infidelity, revealed shortly after his untimely death. But Miller also explores the damage done to Annie’s daughter Sarah, the outcome of her mother’s inability to understand or validate her daughter because she cannot sufficiently love her. When eight-year-old Sarah calls her on this—“you sure don’t love me”—Annie feels “swamped by her own sorrow about Sarah by her inability to feel loving towards her... by her awareness of Sarah’s understanding of that.”

The flip side of Annie’s lack of empathy is her emotional unavailability. Resonance tends to flow in two directions right from the start (as in John Bowlby’s dance of relationship between mother and infant in which each “catches” the other’s mood), Annie is unable to share feelings and thoughts with her daughter.

Tea Burke holds her newborn daughter.

Source: A1C Timothy Young/Wikimedia Commons

Annie recalls that as a child, Sarah had accused her of “unreadability.” After her father dies, Sarah feels jealous that Annie “had shared her sorrow with Frieda (his ex-wife) in a way she hadn’t, or wouldn’t, with her own daughter... and for a moment the old resentment of that touched her again.”

Sarah is large and clumsy, unlike her delicate, fine-boned mother, and this physical difference seems to interfere with Annie’s ability to love her. But this explanation begs the question: What kind of mother is it who responds in this way?

In a snippet of a memory, we see that Annie suffered a lack of resonance and nurture, in her own childhood. She recalls “rushing upstairs to tell her mother of her own rapture on hearing Handel's Messiah performed. Annie’s ecstatic response to music is met with an insensitive and narcissistic narrative:

“Oh, of course, her mother said, dismissal in her voice. She knew it perfectly well. She’d sung it... She remembered what she’d worn for their performances... how sexy she’d looked! She recalled—for herself primarily, Annie sensed even then—the party they’d had after the last performance. Bob had drunk too much... and in the car on the way home, he’d tried to kiss her.”

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We can account for Annie’s inadequate parenting, even if the reader (this reader anyway) holds her responsible. Traumatized people tend to pay it forward.

Sarah grows up to cultivate her talents, including the loud voice that annoys Annie, but which is an asset in many professions. She is successful in radio work, and at the time of her father’s death, she is managing the programming and scripting for an interview show and is well on her way to becoming a producer. But her self-esteem had nevertheless been deeply impaired by her childhood, and she felt unattractive and unlovable for many years.

Sarah had found some of what she lacked from her mother through her father’s more sensitive parenting, although he too was narcissistic, and through her bonding with his ex-wife Frieda. But Sarah ultimately finds redemption with a man who genuinely loves her. At first, she finds it difficult to believe in this love; she cannot accept a compliment or show of affection without ironizing it in some way. But she is finally able to relax into the relationship, realizing that it provides what she has missed:

“She thought of her isolation as a kid, the isolation she had so deliberately and slowly fought her way out of. She thought of Thomas, the miracle of having him in her life, the reward, she couldn’t help feeling sometimes, for her long struggle. And perhaps they would end up married, she and Thomas. Maybe they’d even have a child. But for now, what they had—the deep connection between them—that was exactly what she wanted, was all she’d ever wanted, she felt. That solace. That safety.”

Resonance. Recognition. Validation. Secure attachment. With the windfall of fortune that sometimes rescues the traumatized, Sarah finds these with Thomas.

Miller understands not only the damage we inflict on one another, but the healing we provide as well. And she understands that epic events can be writ small, that the microevents of daily life can make or break us. Miller shows that complex trauma can be complex in more than one way, that it can be hidden and insidious as well as obvious and unmistakable.

This phenomenon needs to be better known. Far too often, clients who have suffered like Sarah blame themselves for their problems—since nothing has “really” happened to them, why should they feel bad, or be professionally unsuccessful, or be friendless, or not be able to have successful intimate relationships? Miller tells us exactly why—complex beings have complex needs, and we can go wrong all too easily.