The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
Interpretation
The struggle between ignoring trauma and expressing it is fundamental in understanding psychological trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman's quote highlights the internal conflict individuals face when dealing with psychological trauma. On one hand, there is a natural inclination to suppress and deny the painful memories associated with traumatic events, while on the other hand, there exists a powerful need to vocalize and process those experiences. This struggle is essential to understanding how trauma impacts individuals and their healing processes.
In practice
In a support group for trauma survivors, someone might say, 'As Judith Lewis Herman pointed out, the conflict between denying our experiences and speaking about them is crucial for healing.'
The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.
Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.
... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.
It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
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