A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person oridea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit,indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as...

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and...

The power we discover inside ourselves as we survive a life-threatening experience can be utilized equally well outside of crisis, too. I am, in every moment, capable of mustering the strength to survive again—or of...

I’m ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I’m not worth holding on to.

If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to...

Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that life is...

It’s as if I died too,’ she whispered to herself, ‘as if I was born dead.’Ironically, it was true. Emotionally she knew what her mind did not, beyond logic, beyond reason, as if somehow deep...

Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time,...

Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It’s the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment—saying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family...

false memory” implantations.

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

You as a whole person are thus unable to reconcile conflicts about anger and learn to tolerate and express anger in healthy ways. Inner turmoil and dissociation are maintained.

In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing...

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (p. 5)

Some flowers need flames to find their way into this world.

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn’t know what was at stake to lose, you...

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all...

I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

Understanding trauma and that we each respond to it differently will help us be supportive and nonjudgmental toward each other.

you are not an athlete because of what you can do, but because of who you are: a team player, someone who never quits, who strives to be his personal best, and who believes in...

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void...

Don’t be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance...

…and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of.

One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization....

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the...

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think – at least beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard...

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which...

Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who’s been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late,...

Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager?I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing...

Memory is dynamic, it’s alive.

Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma?

Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it’s eaten in the author’s belly.

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn’t be scared’… Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with...

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.

Anger is the immune system of the soul.

Somatic Symptoms:People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or...

One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered...

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which...

Instead of showing visibly distinct alternate identities, the typical DID patient presents a polysymptomatic mixture of dissociative and posttraumatic stressdisorder (PTSD) symptoms that are embedded in a matrix of ostensibly non-trauma-related symptoms (e.g., depression, panic...

Hiding my pain and acting strong, afraid to cry and show my tears, I struggle with all this years later.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I’m overdosing on the trauma of others, while still...

Social anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are.

The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually...

It’s all fun and games until somebody dies.

Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been...

These children have suffered a most violent trauma. We must help them to be able to forget the tragedy so that they will be witnesses of peace for the future of humanity.