Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way,...

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

I hold the hands of people I never touch.I provide comfort to people I never embrace.I watch people walk into brick walls, the same ones over and over again, and I coax them to turn...

I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink...

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...

Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards...

I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but...

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

To take such a complex creature, on who was meant for God and is destroyed by sin, and attempt to understand how the development of that creature can be affected by hideous trauma is to...

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...

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and...

…the heart is a muscle like any other. Tearing it down is the only way to make it stronger.

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...

For anyone who wonders what it’s like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it’s like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It’s...

The traumatized soul finds no rest in conditions of peace. It’s forever questing for violence, for action, for the same combination of factors which gave rise to it in the first place.

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...

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of...

It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.

I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her...

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...

instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she...

This book is dedicated to all who have been affected by sexual violence.

It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.

Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren’t present could derive meaning from it?

I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.””Were you always?””What are you, a psychiatrist?”Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him,...

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing.