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.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
It was as if personality itself had a 'face'. This non-physical face of personality seemed to be the real key to personality change. It remained scarred, distorted, 'ugly' or inferior the person himself acted out this role in his behaviour regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this 'face of personality' could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
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