The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
Interpretation
The struggle between ignoring trauma and expressing it is fundamental in understanding psychological trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman's quote highlights the internal conflict individuals face when dealing with psychological trauma. On one hand, there is a natural inclination to suppress and deny the painful memories associated with traumatic events, while on the other hand, there exists a powerful need to vocalize and process those experiences. This struggle is essential to understanding how trauma impacts individuals and their healing processes.
In practice
In a support group for trauma survivors, someone might say, 'As Judith Lewis Herman pointed out, the conflict between denying our experiences and speaking about them is crucial for healing.'
The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.
Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.
... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
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