On psychological trauma
'Once we begin to see not only the "things" in the world but the "connections" in the world--from defining and locating atoms by their relationship to each other to seeing the rain forest as the lungs of our planet; once we start to see not only the people, the men and boys and women and girls, but the relationships between them; once we start to shift our seeing from separate "I's" and "you's" to "we's," our whole world changes and we can never go back,' Shem and Surrey write in We have to talk.
One of the things we can't go back to is the notion that trauma is simply an injury to an arm or a leg--or a vagina or a cerebral cortex. Trauma is an injury to a relationship. Once you see--or, as Carol says, once you stop not seeing--that relationships are real, then you can see that psychological trauma is about breaking, betraying, hurting relationships. When relationships are broken or wounded, the wounds have common characteristics, and the healing of wounds follows a certain pattern. Dissociation--the ability to sever thought from feeling, memory from conscious control, and even one aspect of personality from another--is part of that pattern. On a spectrum that ranges from absentminded "spacing out" to "losing time" and the disjunctions of phenomena announce that psychological trauma has taken place and that a psyche is trying to get better. To psychological science, this is recent knowledge; but to poets and girls, it's common lore.
From This Changes Everything: the Relational Revolution in Psychology, by Christina Robb.
One of the things we can't go back to is the notion that trauma is simply an injury to an arm or a leg--or a vagina or a cerebral cortex. Trauma is an injury to a relationship. Once you see--or, as Carol says, once you stop not seeing--that relationships are real, then you can see that psychological trauma is about breaking, betraying, hurting relationships. When relationships are broken or wounded, the wounds have common characteristics, and the healing of wounds follows a certain pattern. Dissociation--the ability to sever thought from feeling, memory from conscious control, and even one aspect of personality from another--is part of that pattern. On a spectrum that ranges from absentminded "spacing out" to "losing time" and the disjunctions of phenomena announce that psychological trauma has taken place and that a psyche is trying to get better. To psychological science, this is recent knowledge; but to poets and girls, it's common lore.
From This Changes Everything: the Relational Revolution in Psychology, by Christina Robb.