traumatic-stress

Trauma is any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.

Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world _ __ife is good,_ ____ safe,_ __eople are kind,_ __ can trust others,_ __he future is likely to be good_ _ and replaces them with feelings like __he world is dangerous,_ __ can__ win,_ __ can__ trust other people,_ or __here__ no hope.

Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August.I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of.Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'.Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means.So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of h

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.

When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so__alled hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot__ Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can__ see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, __etaphorical_ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.

This book appears at a time when public discussion of the common atrocities of sexual and domestic life has been made possible by the women__ movement, and when public discussion of the common atrocities of political life has been made possible by the movement for human rights. I expect the book to be controversial__irst, because it is written from a feminist perspective; second, because it challenges established diagnostic concepts; but third and perhaps most importantly, because it speaks about horrible things, things that no one really wants to hear about.

Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I'm trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I'm doing is fine to tell people.

When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you__l do anything to make it go away.