“She beckoned to me with a wreath of gold,” cries Kristin Lavransdatter to her father, Lavrans, in Sigrid Undset’s novel The Wreath. Alone among the trees on an unfamiliar mountainside, the child Kristin has stumbled across an elf-maiden—dream, vision, fairy, or demon; Undset leaves the reader to decide, or anxiously speculate—and only when her father answers her screams for help is she saved. But the terror is not over. Danger has breached the fragile, developing boundaries of the young girl’s world for the first time, and now threatens to alter it forever. The elf-maiden remains a frightening and imposing figure in her inner life, appearing without warning in her thoughts and prayers for weeks afterward.

Later, the old monk Edvin takes Kristin into the parish church and shows her the painting of her heavenly patron, Saint Kristina, beside a dragon. “It seems to me the dragon is awfully small,” says Kristin.

“Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves,” Brother Edvin responds. “But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent.”

Brother Edvin’s counsel helps heal Kristin of her fear of evil spirits and reduce them to their right size within her imagination. But as she grows older, another fear enters Kristin’s life. This time it does not come from the world of pagan myth or Christian sainthood. It comes instead from her own community, from the place where she should be most loved and safe.

The teenage Kristin has no fear of elf-maidens and dragons. She knows their proper size. But this new fear grows to huge and grotesque proportions within her, and cannot be shrunk down by the love and protection of her father or Brother Edvin. “Nothing could be as it had been before,” Kristin thinks to herself, “now that a man had dared to do such a thing to her.”

Kristin Lavransdatter is undoubtedly the best-known of Sigrid Undset’s literary creations. Her life in fourteenth-century Norway, from childhood to the moment of death, is charted across three novels—The Wreath, The Bride, and The Cross—for which Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. The trilogy is not a quick read, but neither is it a particularly arduous one; unless, like me, you begin to dislike Kristin as soon as she’s old enough to be held responsible for her actions.

“What’s she up to now?” the sister who lent me the novels would ask whenever we passed each other on the stairs of the convent, not needing to specify whom she was talking about. When I replied with the latest sorry details, whatever they might be—Kristin breaking off her betrothal to the sturdily reliable Simon Darre, for instance, to pursue the adulterous, duplicitous Erlend Nikulaussøn; Kristin stubbornly wearing her father down until he accepts, against all wisdom and prudence, her subsequent betrothal to Erlend; Kristin, helping Erlend dispose of the body of his former mistress, then falling pregnant with his illegitimate child—we would both shake our heads and sigh, “Oh, Kristin.”

Oh, Kristin, indeed. Barely midway through The Wreath I was aghast at the chaos that Kristin had wrought, both on herself and on those closest to her, through the single-minded pursuit of her own desires. But I was also at a loss to know what those desires actually were. What exactly was it that Kristin wanted from Simon, from Erlend, from her parents? What was she searching for from God? What led this young woman, possessed of good intellect and strong character, to—in the well-meaning but bizarrely naïve words of the translator’s note—“defy her family and faith to follow the passions of her heart”?

The heart of Kristin Lavransdatter was, for much of The Wreath, something I simply did not understand. It was a landscape in which small things were made large and large things were made small, and if there was a grand, unifying object at its centre, I did not know what it was. When Kristin first meets Erlend, for instance, it is clear that he is a total creep; and yet as he sits her on the back of his horse Kristin feels “a thrill pass through her, sweet and good,” because “he held her away from himself so carefully.” Later, when he forces himself on her with such aggression that he reminds her of a starving man grasping for bread, she is perfectly happy to lie back “with open arms and let Erlend do as he liked.” Is Kristin totally incapable of setting boundaries, of recognizing and acting on her own interior warning lights of fear and alarm? Apparently not; when Simon, then her betrothed, simply puts his hand on her body, Kristin “sweat[s] with indignation,” and she avoids the most innocuous physical reminders—such as a silver clasp for her cloak that she has “never wanted to wear” since—of certain disturbing events in her past.

“Kristin has absolutely no idea what’s going on in her own interior life,” I told my sister on the stairs. “I mean, what exactly is it that’s driving her to do all this to herself? What does she want?”

Kristin herself provided me with the beginnings of an answer. Mere months before her wedding ceremony, increasingly isolated from her family and no longer able to deny Erlend’s total and devastating untrustworthiness, Kristin Lavransdatter tells the reader that she feels only two things: “her love and her will to survive.”

Oh, Kristin.

The author and psychologist Dan Allender says that only a minority of his counselling clients come to him wanting to talk about trauma. Instead, they come wanting to talk about poor sleep, dysfunctional relationships, pendulum swings between numbness and overreaction that leave them exhausted and frustrated. The recognition of trauma only comes later; and then, God willing, the words for the trauma come too.

Around this time last year, when I first read The Wreath, there was a lot I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the things I did that I couldn’t explain: my habit of shaking uncontrollably, which my sisters had learned to quietly accept; my sudden bouts of weeping, where I felt I was not so much releasing emotion as having it wrenched from me with terrifying force; the phenomenon I jokily described as going on vacation from my body, which stopped being a joke when I did it in the middle of a conversation, or behind the wheel of a car. I wanted to talk about the people who irritated me, and what I should do to make them stop: the people viciously rude enough to touch me on my shoulder, or to stand close to the doorway of my cell (clearly a sign they were about to force their way in) when speaking to me, and still think of themselves as kind and courteous; the people so emotionally oblivious that they believed—and even told me to my face!—that maybe my anxious and defensive behaviour was more about me than it was about them.

I asked my prioress whether I could begin regular meetings with a priest trained in psychology. I was thirty years old, had made my final profession as a religious sister, and was at the stage in my life where I wanted to understand a little bit more about what made me tick. After all, everybody could benefit from a chat with a psychologist, couldn’t they, even if nothing bad had ever happened to them?

So I began to talk. I talked to the priest for an hour every other week, and in between I talked with my community of sisters and my friends outside the convent. I began by simply talking about the things I had wanted to talk about: the shaking, the sobbing, the irritability and dissociation. But the more I talked the more I learned to trust, and the more I trusted the more I was able to talk; and so I found myself being taken down and down, past those surface-level difficulties and deep into a heart that was, I realized, as baffling and obscure to me as Kristin Lavransdatter’s.

Dragons, as Brother Edvin told the child Kristin, seem big only to those who harbour fear within themselves. But they are utterly monstrous to those who do not even recognize the fear they are harbouring. Kristin and Brother Edvin stay in the parish church, studying the painting of Saint Kristina and the dragon, for only a matter of minutes. But I had to study my dragons for many months, with my own Brother Edvin, before I could even begin to accept that there was something within me that was making them seem larger than they really were.

“Nothing could be as it had been before,” thought Kristin Lavransdatter, “now that a man had dared to do such a thing to her.” Like Kristin, I had a before and a now, and splitting the two apart was a huge, hulking shape, larger than dragon or elf-maiden, seemingly larger than God—and, until now, too frightening to name.

Kristin’s sexual assault at the hands of Bentein Eiriksson takes up just under two pages in The Wreath. The prose is spare and unadorned, and what sticks in the mind does so not for its beauty but for its stark exactitude. Kristin is possessed by what modern psychology would describe as her fight response; later she returns to her body, shaking and overwhelmed with shame. She “does not think” to scream aloud. “That’s very accurate,” I told the sister on the stairs when I first read it, without stopping to ask myself why I felt qualified to make such a judgment.

There are times in The Wreath when Kristin thinks back on what happened to her. Sometimes she will “remember Bentein’s body against hers” and “weep about everything that had been visited upon her by violence.” During the attempted robbery that precedes her first encounter with Erlend, she remembers “Bentein’s face close to hers” and she grows “faint and sick.” Other times she wonders whether she was the one at fault; hearing the story of the martyr Saint Theodora, who calls on Christ to preserve her in virginity, Kristin is reminded “in a certain way of her encounter with Bentein” and asks herself “if this was her sin, that she had not for a moment thought of God or prayed for His help.”

But most times Kristin does not think back, or wonder, or weep. There is no point in The Wreath where Kristin recounts the horrors of her assault to another—not to Erlend, not to her father, not even to Brother Edvin—or reflects in great detail on its ongoing impact on her life. Why would she? As Kristin tells us, there are only two things in her heart: her love and her will to survive.

Can the reader then conclude that, once the story is told, the significance of Kristin Lavransdatter’s assault dwindles gradually to nothing? No, because Kristin herself reveals the story again and again, on almost every page. But she shows it only to those who are sensitized to see. She shows it to those who read of her single-minded pursuit of Erlend and observe that her ability to recognize predators has been disconnected as totally as a plug pulled from the socket. She shows it to those who read of her little anxieties and aversions, her refusal even to wear the same clasp she was wearing when Bentein assaulted her, and understand her to be a woman searching for safe boundaries in a fundamentally unsafe world. She shows it, above all, to those who see she is motivated entirely by the desire to control the course of her life by her own self-will and, rather than condemning her as a silly, headstrong little girl, have the patience and loving-kindness to trace this desire back to the time when that control was taken away from her with sudden, devastating, and seemingly invincible force.

“Oh, Kristin,” my sister and I sighed to each other—but each time I was a little more uncertain that I was judging Kristin fairly. I felt that there was more to her story than what she was explicitly saying, and that her baffling patterns of fear and avoidance, determination and desire, were in fact a story all their own. I was increasingly convinced that Kristin’s seemingly self-destructive behaviour was a direct result of her sexual assault—and I was convinced not only by what I was learning about Kristin but also by what I learning about myself.

Trauma, by its nature, resists integration into the story of ourselves. Having totally disrupted our belief that we live in a safe and survivable world, it then goes on to disrupt our memory-making process; it lives on within us not as one clearly discernible pin on a narrative line but as a disjointed jumble of sensations and emotions unregulated by the reason, contextualization, and sense of time and place that tame our non-traumatic memories. If a person is able to simply state that she was abused by this person in this way at this time in her life, this is probably the result of a lot of hard work with a therapist. In the vast majority of cases these memories can only be made sense of slowly and gradually, in a safe environment and with a trusted companion.

But until that environment and that companion are found, these memories make their presence felt in other ways. They want to be noticed. In my case, they had begotten all the little dragons—the bodily dissociation, the emotional overreactions—that were all I had originally wanted to talk about when I began my twice-monthly talks with a priest. After several months, I was able to see them for what they were: responses to that once-huge, once-nameless fear that I now knew to be trauma.

I was keenly aware that none of this would have been possible without the priest, my Brother Edvin, who had taken the time to accompany me and come to know me over many months. It occurred to me that, over the course of those months, I in turn had learned to listen to somebody else—but somebody who happened to be fictional.

When I first began reading The Wreath, I had assumed Kristin Lavransdatter would be a distraction from my problems. Instead, I found she was my companion in them. For three hundred pages I followed her thoughts, memories, and desires, coming to know and understand something of her inner life. I found within it a story waiting to be heard—a story that was an echo of my own.

But as I journeyed with Kristin through The Wreath and on to the last book of the trilogy, The Cross, I found something else: not just companionship in the present but also hope for the future. Kristin spends the final years of her life, following Erlend’s death, in a convent. She enters with a clear desire to give the rest of her life totally to God; while there, she reconciles with two of her sons, nurses plague victims, rescues a young boy from pagan sacrifice, and ensures a Christian burial for his mother. Her life is marked by firm convictions, healed relationships, and selfless service. On her deathbed, she offers God thanks for the gift of her married life, and the faces that surround her as she dies—both real and imagined—are not those of the people she fears, but of those whom she loved and who loved her in return.

The pain and suffering of her assault is not mentioned in this final part of Kristin’s life. But that is not because it is absent. It is still there, but changed beyond recognition—transformed, by God’s grace, into wisdom and compassion. And so Kristin Lavransdatter, whose story of trauma reveals not only what it means to be harmed but also what it means to be healed, dies finally at peace with herself, with her community, and with God.

What does it mean to listen to a survivor of abuse?

Sometimes listening will mean sympathy and presence as a person speaks, or attentiveness when noting down details for a safe environment report. Sometimes listening will mean suppressing the urge to interrupt or dismiss when we hear allegations against a leader we respect, or reflecting back and affirming a person’s description of her abuse in order to reassure her that her words have been heard and received.

But often it will mean none of those things, because we will not even know that we are doing it.

Nowadays, if I wanted to, I could tell the story of my trauma from beginning to end in about three minutes. But those three minutes would only exist because of the twenty or so years that preceded them: the years of slowly recovering a sense of safety and of growing in trust, followed by the year of being guided by a sympathetic companion through the process of understanding my own memories and my own mind. They were years in which many good people were listening to a survivor—and yet none of them, let alone me, knew it until the final, arduous stages of that listening.

The process of listening to a survivor of abuse does not begin at the moment somebody knocks on our door and asks for a conversation. It begins, instead, when we become people who are capable of friendship and willing to pay attention to the lives of others. It begins with the small, graced efforts we make to turn our homes and churches into places of love—the kind of place where a person carrying a deep and buried and wordless fear might, for the first time, feel safe enough and grounded enough to confront it. After that there may be many months or years of silences to honour, anxieties to soothe, anger to forgive—and finally the words will come, and it will be time for us to listen. But by then we will know that in fact we have been listening to this person for a very long time.

I did not know I was listening to a survivor when I began reading The Wreath. It took me time and patience to uncover Kristin Lavransdatter’s story; it meant immersing myself in her world for an entire novel-length of time, until I could finally hear what she was trying to tell me. Was it worth expending so much time and effort on the fictional trauma of a fictional woman? Without doubt—because doing it for Kristin deepened my gratitude for the people who had first done it for me.