sarah xerta

viperslang:

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens. 

 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.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. 

 By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child’s personality structure.

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.

Denying the reality of my experience—that was the most harmful. Not being able to trust anyone was the most serious effect… . I know I acted in ways that were despicable. But I wasn’t crazy. Some people go around acting like that because they feel hopeless. Finally I found a few people along the way who have been able to feel OK about me even though I had severe problems. Good therapists were those who really validated my experience.

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

Most people have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh

 
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery