Reg
05-27-2008, 07:33 AM
I just finished reading this book at the cottage. What an eye-opener.
The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Sanity-Divided-Consciousness-Awareness/dp/0142000558/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211893913&sr=1-1
The author, Martha Stout has written an classic award winner. She explains what Trauma does to the human mind and how those who experience it split off parts of their minds to cope with it. Nearly everyone is affected in one way or another. Dissociation is one of the affects it has on me. When triggered, I float and become emotionally detached. The deeper levels involve DID and MPD.
Here are some quotes that spoke to me....
For the traumatized child, a dissociative state, far from being dysfunctional or crazy, may in fact be lifesaving. And thanks be to the normal human mind that it provides the means.
"This coping strategy becomes dysfunctional only later, after the child is grown and away from the original trauma. When the original trauma is no longer an ongoing fact of life, prolonged dissociative reactions are no longer necessary. But through the years of intensive use, the self-protective strategy has developed a hair trigger. The adult whom the child has become now experiences dissociative reactions to levels of stress that probably would not cause another person to dissociate......".
"I don't understand any of it, but the thing I understand the least is that apparently I go about my business during these times, and nobody notices any difference in me. ......."
"One temporarily has the sense of looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope...."
"Seth's description of his inner life makes it wrenchingly clear that the traumatized person is unable to feel completely connected to another person, even a friend, even a spouse. Just as limiting, perhaps even more limiting, is such a person's disconnection from his or her body...."
"Writing about the distribution and determinants of post traumatic reactions in human populations, McFarlane and de Girolamo state that, more than just frightening or painful, traumatic situations are "events that violate" our existing ways of making sense of our reactions, structuring our perceptions of other people's behaviour, and creating a framework for interacting with the world at large......"
"By definition, a traumatic event, whether it be objectively tragic or not, opens the mind of a corridor to the apprehension of our essential helplessness and the possibility of death. A traumatic stressor is overwhelming not because it is colossal - for it may not be so to observers - but because it has a certain meaning for the individual...."
"What is traumatic for one may not be for another. Traumatic events, nightmares and intrusive memories come for perhaps years. For an onlooker, two more or less identical scenes. For the participant, two very different meanings. Meaning is the important thing. It determines the corridor to helplessness and death will open up, or remain shut and disregarded by us, as that channel usually does....."
"To make matters even more excruciating for the young, the immature cognitive capacities of early childhood (and many of victims of SA) make it difficult, often impossible, to create an articulate narrative from a threatening event, after the fact..."
"But the two most compelling facts we know about this issue, forming a mandate that simply will not go away, are first, that in report after report, the "dissociative disorders" are correlated with childhood trauma, and second, that the treatment of traumatic memories is crucial to the recovery of persons with debilitating dissociative reactions......"
"Emotional agony is like physical pain, in that it is a danger signal, forcing us to notice something is wrong, and to respond....."
"For some people, a single visual image or a powerful phrase or a word may be enough of a keyhole into the past to initiate the conscious relabeling and detoxification of a long succession of related traumatic events, not all of which are remembered specifically...."
"Another trigger that may be recognizable to some is performance anxiety, which is sometimes what we feel when we must accomplish a task of personal significance before an audience of one or more people...."
"She has a sense of being out of body, an impression that she is floating a little above herself, and that her body is acting on its own..... and no one notices anything unusual about her mental status.."
"I was forced to understand how fear affects the mind - and how easily some people can use hardship and fear to paralyze and control their fellow human beings...."
'She feels like a spectator, rather than a participant..."
"Dissociation can be compared to a drug (another human tool that can help or harm). The ability to dissociate is like having an unlimited supply of a medium-to-good narcotic that never habituates. And by the time we are adults, this mental analgesia is so trigger-happy that trauma or overwhelming fear or pain is no longer required to infuse it; because circumstances are frequently anxiety-provoking or difficult or confusing or just uncertain, we take small potentiated escapes from our present moments...."
"A survivor of trauma is a victim certainly; but "victim" does not comprise the totality of a person's identity. Helpers must support the healing process in both of it's phases: the survivor must endure the discovery that they were a victim and they must take responsibility for being no longer..."
"In many ways, close study of dissociative behaviour supports an old truth, that, we cannot simultaneously protect ourselves and experience life fully....."
"The truth is that for any human being to change significantly is a massive undertaking....."
The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Sanity-Divided-Consciousness-Awareness/dp/0142000558/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211893913&sr=1-1
The author, Martha Stout has written an classic award winner. She explains what Trauma does to the human mind and how those who experience it split off parts of their minds to cope with it. Nearly everyone is affected in one way or another. Dissociation is one of the affects it has on me. When triggered, I float and become emotionally detached. The deeper levels involve DID and MPD.
Here are some quotes that spoke to me....
For the traumatized child, a dissociative state, far from being dysfunctional or crazy, may in fact be lifesaving. And thanks be to the normal human mind that it provides the means.
"This coping strategy becomes dysfunctional only later, after the child is grown and away from the original trauma. When the original trauma is no longer an ongoing fact of life, prolonged dissociative reactions are no longer necessary. But through the years of intensive use, the self-protective strategy has developed a hair trigger. The adult whom the child has become now experiences dissociative reactions to levels of stress that probably would not cause another person to dissociate......".
"I don't understand any of it, but the thing I understand the least is that apparently I go about my business during these times, and nobody notices any difference in me. ......."
"One temporarily has the sense of looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope...."
"Seth's description of his inner life makes it wrenchingly clear that the traumatized person is unable to feel completely connected to another person, even a friend, even a spouse. Just as limiting, perhaps even more limiting, is such a person's disconnection from his or her body...."
"Writing about the distribution and determinants of post traumatic reactions in human populations, McFarlane and de Girolamo state that, more than just frightening or painful, traumatic situations are "events that violate" our existing ways of making sense of our reactions, structuring our perceptions of other people's behaviour, and creating a framework for interacting with the world at large......"
"By definition, a traumatic event, whether it be objectively tragic or not, opens the mind of a corridor to the apprehension of our essential helplessness and the possibility of death. A traumatic stressor is overwhelming not because it is colossal - for it may not be so to observers - but because it has a certain meaning for the individual...."
"What is traumatic for one may not be for another. Traumatic events, nightmares and intrusive memories come for perhaps years. For an onlooker, two more or less identical scenes. For the participant, two very different meanings. Meaning is the important thing. It determines the corridor to helplessness and death will open up, or remain shut and disregarded by us, as that channel usually does....."
"To make matters even more excruciating for the young, the immature cognitive capacities of early childhood (and many of victims of SA) make it difficult, often impossible, to create an articulate narrative from a threatening event, after the fact..."
"But the two most compelling facts we know about this issue, forming a mandate that simply will not go away, are first, that in report after report, the "dissociative disorders" are correlated with childhood trauma, and second, that the treatment of traumatic memories is crucial to the recovery of persons with debilitating dissociative reactions......"
"Emotional agony is like physical pain, in that it is a danger signal, forcing us to notice something is wrong, and to respond....."
"For some people, a single visual image or a powerful phrase or a word may be enough of a keyhole into the past to initiate the conscious relabeling and detoxification of a long succession of related traumatic events, not all of which are remembered specifically...."
"Another trigger that may be recognizable to some is performance anxiety, which is sometimes what we feel when we must accomplish a task of personal significance before an audience of one or more people...."
"She has a sense of being out of body, an impression that she is floating a little above herself, and that her body is acting on its own..... and no one notices anything unusual about her mental status.."
"I was forced to understand how fear affects the mind - and how easily some people can use hardship and fear to paralyze and control their fellow human beings...."
'She feels like a spectator, rather than a participant..."
"Dissociation can be compared to a drug (another human tool that can help or harm). The ability to dissociate is like having an unlimited supply of a medium-to-good narcotic that never habituates. And by the time we are adults, this mental analgesia is so trigger-happy that trauma or overwhelming fear or pain is no longer required to infuse it; because circumstances are frequently anxiety-provoking or difficult or confusing or just uncertain, we take small potentiated escapes from our present moments...."
"A survivor of trauma is a victim certainly; but "victim" does not comprise the totality of a person's identity. Helpers must support the healing process in both of it's phases: the survivor must endure the discovery that they were a victim and they must take responsibility for being no longer..."
"In many ways, close study of dissociative behaviour supports an old truth, that, we cannot simultaneously protect ourselves and experience life fully....."
"The truth is that for any human being to change significantly is a massive undertaking....."