How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me

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i used to be pretty 'traumatized' in the classic sense - nightmares, difficulty sleeping, etc. Over the course of a 1-2 years I managed to fix nearly all of it. I used a lot of techniques - but one thing that was noticeably absent in my healing was psychological narrative. 1/

Aella

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gabriel and added

As a survival strategy, dissociation of this kind is ingenious, serving the precise function for our nervous system that a circuit breaker does for your house. Unfortunately, human minds don’t flip back on so easily. When they do, the process of “reintegration”—reconciling the traumatic memories with the preexisting self—can be painful.

Jayson Greene • The Rise of Dissociation Music

Keely Adler added

The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk

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Cover of The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

Lael Johnson and added

Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,” he’d say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every fac

Bessel van der Kolk • The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

You see, there is a tendency in us to find suffering aversive. And so we want to distance ourselves from it. Like if you have a toothache, it becomes that toothache. It’s not us anymore. It’s that tooth. And so if there are suffering people, you want to look at them on television or meet them but then keep a distance from them. Because you are afra

Swapneel • Dealing With Suffering and Seeing It as Grace

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If the trauma is severe enough, a person may lose the capacity to concentrate on necessary goals. If that happens, the self is no longer in control. If the impairment is very severe, consciousness becomes random, and the person “loses his mind”—the various symptoms of mental disease take over. In less severe cases the threatened self survives, but

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Traumatized people are left with an experience of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the consensual reality of others.

Mark Epstein • The Trauma of Everyday Life

The sense of being inhabited by warring impulses or parts is common to all of us but particularly to traumatized people who had to resort to extreme measures in order to survive. Exploring—even befriending—those parts is an important component of healing.