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Edited on Wed Aug-04-10 09:37 AM by raccoon
…when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides….It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. (p.7-8)
Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images…In their predominance of imagery and bodily sensation, and in their absence of verbal narrative, traumatic memories resemble the memories of young children. (p. 38)
“The everyday play of childhood…is free and easy. It is bubbly and light-spirited, whereas the play that follows from trauma is grim and monotonous...Play does not stop easily when it is traumatically inspired. And it may not change much over time. As opposed to ordinary child’s play, post-traumatic play is obsessively repeated…Post-traumatic play is so literal that if you spot it, you may be able to guess the trauma with few other clues.” (p. 39 (Quoted from L. Terr, Too Scared to Cry, (New York: HarperCollins 1990) 238,239,247.))
…Most women do not in fact recognize the degree of male hostility toward them, preferring to view the relations of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly, women like to believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in reality. (p. 69)
(regarding psychological domination) The threat of death or serious harm is much more frequent than the actual resort to violence. Fear is also increased by inconsistent and unpredictable outbursts of violence and by capricious enforcement of petty rules.…the perpetrator seeks to destroy the victim’s sense of autonomy. This is achieved by scrutiny and control of the victim’s body and bodily functions. (p. 77)
The intrusive symptoms of PTSD also persist in survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma. But unlike the intrusive symptoms after a single acute trauma,, which tend to abate in weeks or months, these symptoms may persist with little change for many years…the features of PTSD that become most exaggerated in chronically traumatized people are avoidance or constriction. When the victim has been reduced to a goal of simple survival, psychological constriction becomes an essential form of adaptation. This narrowing applies to every aspect of life—to relationships, activities, thoughts, memories, emotions, and even sensations. And while this constriction is adaptive in captivity, it also leads to a kind of atrophy in the psychological capacities that have been suppressed and to the overdevelopment of a solitary inner life. (p. 87)
…prisoners develop the capacity voluntarily to restrict and suppress their thoughts. This practice applies especially to any thoughts of the future. Thinking of the future stirs up such intense yearning and hope that prisoners find it unbearable; they quickly learn that these emotions make them vulnerable o disappointment and that disappointment will make them desperate. They therefore consciously narrow their attention, focusing on extremely limited goals. The future is reduced to a matter of hours or days….Alterations in time sense being with the obliteration of the future but eventually progress to the obliteration of the past…The past, like the future, becomes too painful to bear, for memory, like hope, brings back the yearning for all that has been lost. Thus prisoners are eventually reduced to living in an endless present. (p. 89)
Like abused adults, abused children are often rageful and sometimes aggressive. They often lack verbal and social skills for resolving conflict, and they approach problems with the expectation of hostile attack. (p. 104)
…In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent. ..More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent. She may in fact feel more strongly attached to the abuser, who demonstrated a perverse interest in her, than in the nonoffending parent, whom she perceives as indifferent. (p. 106)
(In the grown up abused child) Ordinary interpersonal conflicts may provoke intense anxiety, depression, or rage. In the mind of the survivor, even minor slights evoke past experiences of callous neglect, and minor hurts evoke past experiences of deliberate cruelty. These distortions are not easily corrected by experience, since the survivor tends to lack the verbal and social skills for resolving conflict. Thus the survivor develops a pattern of intense, unstable relationships, repeatedly enacting dramas of rescue, injustice, and betrayal. (p. 111)
(Pierre) Janet described normal memory as “the action of telling a story.” Traumatic memory, by contract, is wordless and static. (p. 175)
“Re-education is often indicated (for incest victims), pertaining to what is typical, average, wholesome, and ‘normal’ in the intimate life of ordinary people. Victims of incest tend to be woefully ignorant of these matters, owing to their skewed and secretive early environments. Although victims in their original homes, they are like strangers in a foreign country, once ‘safely’ outside.” (p. 196)
Helplessness and isolation are the core experiences of psychological trauma. Empowerment and reconnection are the core experiences of recovery. (p. 197)
Because subordination of women and children has been so deeply embedded in our culture, the user of force against women and children has only recently been recognized as a violation of basic human rights. Widespread patterns of coercive control such as battering, stalking, sexual harassment, and acquaintance rape were not even named, let alone understood to be crimes, until they were defined by the feminist movement. (p. 244)
Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
edited for spelling
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