Dog Days and the Interior Wreckage a Trauma Plot Cannot Map

Emily LaBarge was attacked. That much is known. What happened after — the months and years in which the event lodged itself in her nervous system, her writing, her sense of what a day is — is the subject of Dog Days, her memoir. The book does not move in a straight line. It circles. It returns to things that were not resolved the first time and will not be resolved the second. It presses on ordinary moments to feel what they feel like now, after. It gives the reader not an account of suffering but something closer to its texture.

That texture is the point. And it is worth attending to carefully, because what LaBarge refuses to do is more anthropologically revealing than what she does.

What the book actually shows

The trauma memoir, as a cultural form, carries a set of implicit claims about persons: that suffering moves through identifiable stages, that the work of healing is fundamentally a work of narrative integration, and that a well-processed event eventually yields a legible lesson. LaBarge's book declines all of this. The violent event is present everywhere and accounted for nowhere. The memoir's form is the experience of the aftermath: disjointed, recursive, unable to settle.

This is not a failure of craft. It is an act of precision. The book gives an impression of what the interior looks like when something terrible has happened and has not finished happening — which is to say, it shows what a therapist actually receives when someone walks in carrying a violent event that will not stay in the past.

Jordan Peterson, in Maps of Meaning, describes post-traumatic stress as what occurs when an event violates a highest-order axiom — an assumption so foundational that its collapse does not leave a single gap in a person's perceptual world but brings the organizing structure itself down.[^1] The body reads a familiar street as a threat. Faces carry new information they did not carry before. The past tense stops working reliably; the event keeps happening in the present tense of perception. What LaBarge renders in prose — circling, returning, never fully resolving — is precisely that: an interior that has lost the architecture it was using to organize experience, and has not yet found another.

That is the raw data a therapist receives. Before any reconstruction can begin, it must be received as it is.

The limits of the processing model

The dominant clinical response to this kind of presentation is to help the person process the event: decompose the memory, detach its emotional charge, and move it reliably into the past. There is genuine psychological wisdom here. A memory that still carries live emotional charge is, in a clinical sense, still active — still shaping perception and behavior as though the event were ongoing.[^2]

But the inference that follows in popular therapeutic culture — that the goal is the elimination of emotional residue, and that a well-processed event leaves no lasting mark — is where an anthropological mistake enters. The person becomes a problem to be solved. Suffering is an interruption in an otherwise intact life, and the task is to restore that life to its prior state.

Steven Hayes, in developing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, pushes against this model. Psychological flexibility, in his account, is not the absence of difficult inner content but a changed relationship to it: the person acts from chosen values while carrying the memory, rather than waiting until the memory disappears before living.[^3] That is closer to what LaBarge seems to be doing on the page. She has not eliminated the event. She is writing around it, which is different from writing it away.

But even this framework stops short of a question that a Catholic anthropology presses: what is this disjointed interior showing us, and what does faithful accompaniment of it actually require?

The therapist as first receiver

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus understand the human person as a unity of body and soul whose interior faculties — sensory, cognitive, emotional, volitional — are ordered to one another and to truth. In the Fallen state, that order is disrupted. Concupiscence is not merely disordered desire in the moral sense; it names a more comprehensive disorder in which the person's evaluative apparatus no longer reliably tracks reality. A violent event does not simply damage a memory. It disrupts the cogitative sense — the faculty Benjamin Suazo identifies as the capacity to read persons and situations rightly — and that disruption propagates through the whole interior.[^4]

This means that what LaBarge's book presents is not a stylistic choice but a symptom in the original sense: a sign of something going on in the interior. The fragmented, circling, non-linear form of Dog Days is the phenomenology of a person whose cogitative and evaluative faculties have been disorganized by a violent intrusion. The therapist's first task is not to straighten that form out. It is to receive it — to stay with the disjointed account long enough to understand what the person's interior currently looks like and how it is currently reading the world.

This is where a Catholic therapist's formation matters. McWhorter, drawing on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, argues that the formation of mental health professionals must include genuine hermeneutic reflection — the capacity to meet a client's account without immediately assimilating it to the therapist's own interpretive framework.[^5] Clinical empathy, on this account, is not projection or even identification but the kind of understanding that emerges when two perspectives genuinely converge. The therapist does not already know what the fragmented account means. The work is to understand it, and understanding requires patience with its non-linearity before any reconstruction is attempted.

Accompaniment before reconstruction

The distinction matters clinically. A therapist who moves too quickly to reconstruction — to narrative integration, to meaning-making, to the question of what the event was for — risks doing to the client what the trauma plot does to the memoir: imposing a legible arc on an experience that has not yet yielded one. The person is asked to perform recovery before they have been genuinely received in their disruption.

This is the specific pastoral failure that a Catholic framework is positioned to name. Accompaniment, as the tradition understands it, is not a preliminary phase before the real therapeutic work begins. It is the real therapeutic work in its first and most demanding form. The therapist must sit with the circling, the returning, the inability to stay in the past tense — must receive it as data about the person's actual interior rather than as a presentation to be corrected.

Only once that reception is genuine can the question of reconstruction open. And here the CCMMP offers a frame that the processing model does not. Aquinas identifies memory as an integral part of prudence — not mere recollection but the ordered use of past experience as a resource for present judgment. The goal of accompaniment is not to detach the memory from its emotional charge so that it can be filed away. It is to help the person carry the memory differently: as something that belongs to them, that has shaped them, that they can now bring to bear on how they read and move through the world.

That is a different kind of healing than the trauma plot imagines. It does not promise that the event will stop mattering. It promises something harder and more durable: that the person can be more than what happened to them, and that what happened to them can become, over time, a source of perception rather than a source of ongoing threat.

What remains to be read

When someone arrives in a therapist's office carrying an event like the one LaBarge describes — carrying it the way she carries it, in fragments, sideways, unable to put it in the past tense — the first question is not whether they have processed it adequately. The first question is whether they have been genuinely heard in its disjointed form.

Dog Days is, among other things, a record of what that disjointed form actually looks like. It is the raw data. The work of a Catholic therapist is to receive that data without immediately translating it into a narrative it has not yet earned — and then, slowly, to help the person find their way to an interior that is not organized around the violence of what was done to them, but is large enough to carry it without being defined by it.

The memory that still burns is not evidence that healing has failed. It is a sign that the work of reception has not yet been finished.

[^1]: Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999).

[^2]: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014).

[^3]: Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012).

[^4]: Benjamin Suazo, Psicopatología y mal moral (Madrid: Palabra, 2018).

[^5]: L. McWhorter, 'Gadamer and the Training of Mental Health Professionals,' Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12, no. 2 (2005): 111–21.