Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.
Interpretation
Traumatized individuals struggle with a sense of safety and often disconnect from their own feelings and bodies.
This quote by Bessel Van Der Kolk highlights the profound impact of trauma on individuals. It explains how trauma can lead to a persistent feeling of unsafety within one's own body, which manifests as discomfort and anxiety. The past traumas continue to influence their present experiences through these warning signals. As a coping mechanism, many people trained themselves to ignore these innate responses, leading to a disconnection from their true selves and feelings.
In practice
In a mental health seminar discussing the effects of trauma on individuals.
People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience. Some people, some kids particularly, are able to disappear into a fantasy world, to dissociate, to pretend like it isnt happening, and are able to go on with their lives. And sometimes it comes back to haunt them.
The parent-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
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