We were angry
An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound d like the history of what actually happened became a new kind of history. All these stories that we haven’t been yelling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. That that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient.
... See moreDid all these people really experience “trauma?” in a recognizably similar way?
Petersen writes • Failure to Cope "Under Capitalism"
Whether the trauma had occurred ten years in the past or more than forty, my patients could not bridge the gap between their wartime experiences and their current lives. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.
Bessel van der Kolk • The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
What we have aimed to do—contra the popular assumption that trauma is self-evident and that those who speak of it are simply revealing a reality—is to understand what is at play when we interpret the world and its disorders through this concept, which has moved from clinical psychiatry into everyday parlance. (pink)
Link
First, trauma obliterates experiences. It operates as a screen between the event and its context on the one hand, and the subject and the meaning he or she gives to the situation on the other. By reducing, whether in clinical terminology or in common language, the link between what happened and what was experienced to a set of symptoms, or even of... See more