beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of...

Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood...

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear – by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.

Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people let everyone in...

No, Sky. You didn’t tell her everything…you told you everything. Those things happened to you, not to someone else. They happened to Hope. They happened to Sky. They happened to the best friend that I...

He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in...

Success and failure can both make you lose appetite and concentration, don’t let it bother or over-excite you, just think them away as a mere thing that had just happened, and get along with your...

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and...

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of...

Trauma. It doesn’t eke itself out over time. It doesn’t split itself manageably into bite-sized chunks and distribute itself equally throughout your life.Trauma is all or nothing. A tsunami wave of destruction.A tornado of unimaginable...

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability...

God wants you to be delivered from what you have done and from what has been done to you – Both are equally imporant to Him.

When you hold onto a script that doesn’t serve you, you leave no space to write a new one that does.

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children.

That is the problem with repressed memory and dissociative identity disorder. Your mind represses certain traumas for reasons of pure survival. And then you learn that to survive as an adult, you must uncover the...

As I feel less overwhelmed, my fear softens and begins to subside. I feel a flicker of hope, then a rolling wave of fiery rage. My body continues to shake and tremble. It is alternately...

The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.

It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

Thus far we have been able to protect [our children] from the deep and enduring traumas that scar the minds and selves of so many of the patients I see. How — how?—can I make...

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the...

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:For everything under the sun there is a time.This is the season of your awkward harvesting,When the pain takes you where you would rather not...

The true self is that which is in touch with reality. The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the...

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

Don’t you seewhat’s going on in this house?” To this day, if somehow even in jest raises their hand to me, I will do this (raises hands to protect face andcowers) I cringe. Then they...

over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates – whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just...

Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.

The city?s first concern is the people … to minimize the trauma,

Trauma for vehicular accidents drops off until the snow hits the deck. Then the snow melts away and the numbers drop.

That day wasn’t the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings – back then I thought it an act of empowerment....

So I let my shame own me, kill me, wilt me away into a thousand dead flakes, knowing if I kept it all in, she would never have to learn the dirtiness that was forever...

If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember – their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into – or remain – whoever we...

like the past” and emergency emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight,flight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more...

Phrases such as “I’m beside myself,” “I was frightened to pieces,” “I feel lost,” “I feel like part of me is missing,” originated from a sense of soul loss.

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if...

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can...

It doesn’t take two minutes on an examining table for a girl to know that abortion is painful and destructive and it’ll have far-reaching effects on her life. Besides the emotional trauma of going through...

Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices....

There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.

The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims...

I’m back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She’s lying on an alter, and they’re hurting her. The bastards. They’re hurting her. There is blood all over...

So, what role does memory play in the understanding and treatment of trauma? There is a form of implicit memory that is profoundly unconscious and forms the basis for the imprint trauma leaves on the...

front person” for the system.

Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.

As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on … It soon became apparent that what I...

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world...

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you...

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn’s stories could not be denied. She was not only...