if it’s a traditional diary-style blog, it’s probably still mostly an individual’s internal thoughts. If it’s an outwardly focused personal blog, it’s probably carefully curated and crafted, which defeats the purpose of what journaling is supposed to be.

dreading writing hurts your ability to create sharp content

you could absorb and internalize their wisdom. Call it osmosis-by-handwriting. (Some people would copy out whole books by their favorite writers in the hopes of achieving some kind of voodoo transference of power.)

“social death”. 

faultless diction, subtle nuancing of text, seamless line and a light, unstudied tone productio

scholasticism without the charm of dogma

filling me with revulsion

Fear leads to anger.

the amount of driving considered normal

Make your case!

When one's partner is disappearing into the fog of dementia

Ephemera are any transitory written or printed matters that are not meant to be retained or preserved

personal sites presenting one's collection

Instead of experiencing writer’s block or a lack of inspiration, you may experience another challenge: having too many ideas to select from.

When we’re improvising a jazz solo, we’re essentially having a musical conversation.

Music as a Language

Witness for the Defence

Subculture

By positing utility as the end of knowledge,Bacon laid the foundation of humans’ ability to ‘‘subdueand overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.’’

challenges.

I like having nice curves, and I feel quite feminine. I feel like a goddess. When I was single, it was easy to rule out guys whose eyes constantly gravitated towards my chest — yes, they are real and they are spectacular — but when we are having a conversation you should look at my face.

The inferencefrom [1] The memory has a from-the-inside character in emo-tional respects to [2] The memory is experienced as somethingthat happened to me* is simply not valid, although for manypeople [1] and [2] are often or usually true together

‘revenge culture’

Individual variation

3

Ithink of . . . the masterpiece in question . . . as the work of quiteanother person than myself . . . a rich . . . re lation, say, who . . .

see

NARRATIVITY

If You Fail, No One Sees It but You

Limited Feedback

Avoid Social Anxiety Social anxiety is no joke. In fact, 15 million Americans live with social anxiety. This disorder can make it nearly impossible to meet new people, frequent big events, or even have one on one conversations. College can be one of the biggest triggers of social anxiety. When triggered, social anxiety causes increased heart rate, loss of concentration, a sense of panic, and sweating. People who go through these attacks want to self isolate, and the more these events happen, the harder it can be to recover.  Self education is a fantastic way for people with social anxiety disorder to continue learning. While college can be terrifying, learning from their living room is not. Self education offers a safe place, away from students and strangers, and the pressures of society.

Autodidacticism is defined as the process or practice of learning a subject without a teacher or formal education

Cost of Supplies

You need to take time to think about what is really important, rather than trying to figure out how to pack as much as you can into the shortest possible schedule

“Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality.”“Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.”

“twins paradox” or “clock paradox”, whereby a hypothetical astronaut returns from a near-light speed voyage in space to find his stay-at-home twin many years older than him

late

one long aphorism

We are always only in our own company

If we are not beguiled by Freud’s symptomatic misreading of the play and examine the particular familial context of Oedipus’ life—his parents abandoned him and left him for dead—then what was done to him by his parents rather than something innate and troublesome inside of him (the wish to sleep with his mother and kill his father), is the real “complex” Oedipus labors under.

Another persistent critique of the Oedipus complex is its overwhelmingly masculine theme, with Freud’s original theory focusing almost exclusively on the sexual development of boys. When speaking of the female perspective in the Oedipus complex, Freud tended to frame it in masculine terms: for example, he describes girls as suffering from penis envy, a supposed realization that they do not possess a penis, which causes many anxieties that, Freud claimed, originate in girls’ unwelcome realization that they are not men like their fathers. Freud himself claimed that “psychology…is unable to solve the riddle of femininity,

when a patient of mine in a group says something and the other group members respond with ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘I don’t get it,’ it is not that they haven’t understood their fellow, no matter how unclear he is being, but rather, it is that they’ve let a frustrating experience block their intuitive and instinctive ability to synthesize the available data into a likely narrative or meaning, or synthetic knowing. They have crossed out their ability to make meaningful links and associations to this fellow's words and affect which would allow an internal transforming and sense making of his utterances. Compounding this is a sneaky resistance, what I call the Socratic Neurotic – ‘I avoid saying / acting I know because one can only learn when one admits one does not know!’

deliberately

If we think about moral injury as the VA does, then it is primarily an experience of shame and guilt. If so, then the examples I have drawn on suggest that it is primarily the shame and guilt of the powerless.

The psychological Narrativity thesis is the idea that it is unavoidable human nature to experience their lives as a story. The ethical Narrativity thesis is the idea that conceiving of one’s life as narrative is a good thing, essential to a moral life and true personhood.

Unpack My Heart with Words

maybe because part of the stuckness of trauma has something to do with the inability or unwillingness of the victim to “think” it, in the sense of making it available to be modified, comprehended, re-shaped either internally or in a communicative relationship?

that it is as if all human beings, parents and children alike, are really children who wish someone to know their agony so that the tale can be told (p. 210), then the therapist must be prepared to devote the time and energy of a parent

The main reason projective identification doesn’t cure trauma is that it requires enormous time, dedication, and even love on the part of the therapist.

e cannot be convinced that they understand until we are convinced that they now contain the experience.

pure victim position

F

“authentic trauma fiction” enlists its readers to become witnesses to these kinds of stories through the unconventional narrative translations of traumatic experience and memory that give them a different kind of access to the past than conventional frameworks . . . . when readers absorb these stories [like Beloved] through the division of voice . . . they experience something analogous to splitting

putting the lie to any romantic or heroic representation of war, even (or especially) a victory

to bring to life

o tell the story may become a way of not feeling it.

Yet, if one takes the idea that the body keeps the score seriously, then one must at least consider that every narrative is a cover story, and that the ability to tell a coherent narrative is a misleading measure of recovery from trauma. This would help explain the suicide of such brilliant narrators of Holocaust trauma as Primo Levi and Jean Améry

It is hard to listen to the victims of extreme trauma, and so we shut ourselves off. Not being curious is a leading strategy. In a sense we make the testimony possible by being willing to listen, for without listeners there could be no testimony. But we should not congratulate ourselves either. Those who testify to trauma have already done the hard work on their own.

dissociative

The traumatized person is constantly remembering the past; he or she is overwhelmed by the past.

The problem with trauma, what makes trauma unique, is not the special quality of traumatic memory, but the symptoms that accompany traumatic memory. It is the symptoms that need to be addressed.

we never remember the trauma, only the memory of the trauma, applies to all the significant events of our lives.

as many of those who write about trauma hold that trauma may be so intense that even (or especially) the traumatized cannot represent themselves, but must be represented by another, who can put into words what the traumatized cannot

But those who write about trauma as though it were a text, those who deal with trauma in literature rather than in life, run the risk of cheap intensity,

Witnessing has become an increasingly popular genre as far as trauma studies is concerned

Or the author approaches trauma as though it were a sacred experience, almost too awesome for words. But only “almost,” for academics write a lot about trauma.

an autistic prison

deeply traumatic experiences are events without witnesses, experienced a moment too late, before the self was there to mediate it. As a result, the trauma remains unsymbolized, unintegrated into normal memory.

before its recipient was prepared to know it

veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.” (p. 20) This makes moral injury an issue of knowledge, not just an emotional experience for which the psyche was unprepared.

fragmentation

technical economics which is now de rigueur. But although I learnt well enough how to use the system of arcane jargon and techniques, it was never quite correct enough in the required way. I couldn’t quite disabuse myself of the desire to say something interesting or meaningful. “Don’t try to be original,” I was advised. “Crank the handle, copy someone else’s work, but with a slight variation.” “Technique it up” was another frequent suggestion; i.e. wrap up what you are saying in jargon and presentational gimmicks. Ultimately, my desire to be clear and consequential proved to be too much of a handicap: I realised I was never going to be permitted to be anything more than a C-list academic, and left Oxford. (A severe disappointment, given that my supervisor at Cambridge had once described me as one of the people most suited to research he had ever encountered.)

The high level of technicality and referencing typically masks the triviality — or absence — of genuine content.

Herman (188, 195) argues that mourning trauma is so threatening because it seems endless, as if one is entering into a permanent state of overwhelming loss. In truth, it is only entry into the state of overwhelming loss that allows for the trauma to recede.

incomprehensible

If loss is the continuation of the suffering of absence into the present, then trauma is the freezing of past and present into a single frozen moment.

We cry out for the world to respond, and the world is silent, uncaring, because it cannot care.

Often benign, perhaps even therapeutic, our lies must look like a fortress to those who cannot, or in some cases simply will not, let themselves inside its sheltering walls.

“the normative, quotidian aspects of trauma in the lives of many oppressed and disempowered persons” leave many psychotherapists unable to recognize that a person is suffering from post-traumatic distress

CBT also includes prolonged exposure therapy, sometimes called flooding, in which memories of a traumatic event are rehearsed (retold) again and again. The idea is that the intense initial reactions of panic will be “extinguished” over time as the mind and body become used to being overwhelmed.  Not everyone considers flooding a version of CBT

it takes lot of time and attention to help someone with PTSD, and CBT seems like a quick fix

Why should one imagine that the narrative and the narrator are one?  Perhaps the separation of narrative and narrator saved his life, but finally took it, as his real life bore in on his narrative world. The resolution of trauma is not the perfected trauma narrative but its opposite: living in the present.

Much trauma theory gets it backwards, imagining that the task is to recover an original experience of trauma, one that cannot be put into words. No, the task is to help the traumatized live a new narrative, a new life. Needed is reentry into the experience of going-on-being so the trauma survivor can let go of an overly narrativized trauma. Or rather, let go of a trauma narrative that has become a perverse transitional object, substituting for one’s own going-on-being.  I believe that this is what Maurice Blanchot means when he refers to “the danger that the disaster acquire meaning instead of body.”

She did not confuse then and now

Almost all are able to narrate their experience coherently

unmediated experience

e are never simply passive observers as life paradesbefore and around us.

There is no denying suffering, but suffering can be en-dowed with meaning.

Our rational, more reasonable philosophical mindswant to resist such “absurd” postures. All too often, philosophers simply insistthat life is meaningful, without argument, if only because the over-reachingphilosophical question (about the meaning of life) is itself meaningless.

cynicism

Philosophy, becauseit is on the side of reason, is by contrast a kind of resignation coupled withplayful distraction and self-deception, the very opposite of spirituality

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wantsnothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it

the trauma of separation is the most important trauma we shall ever experience. It begins with birth, ends with death, but along the way we experience it thousands of times in ways big and little

The trauma of being left, not out of a sexual relationship, but simply being left all alone without the internal resources to cope, absent a sense of the continuity of one’s being, is the fundamental trauma of childhood.

Trauma, says Freud, is the result of fright, an emotion that he distinguishes from fear and dread, both of which anticipate the danger. Fright is the sudden experience of an unanticipated danger. “It describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it.”

Trauma victims are not freed by going over the past again and again. Nor are they freed when someone else hears their story and understands. Memory work is important, so that the lost time is no longer as terrifying. But completed narratives don’t fill the gap. They just help give the gap a beginning and an end. The real work is investing in the world now in all the ways people do: living, loving, working, building, making, doing.

The victim of trauma is caught in a world which is constantly being unmade by his or her reactivity to stimuli that resemble (only faintly, a naive observer might imagine) the original event. To live in a world that in an unpredictable instant can become that other world, the world of the originating trauma, is to be an endangered self, one who is no longer an actor in the world. Eventually there is no originating trauma, just trauma, constantly reacting to intimations of panic, pain, horror, doubt, Doubt so fundamental it questions the existence of oneself as an actor and agent in the world.

It rejects what is most valuable in assumptive world theory—that the assumptive world is a collective enterprise, maintained by us all. Trauma happens when this collective enterprise fails.

Bessie K. did not lose an omnipotent fantasy when she was in the concentration camp. She lost all connections to normal human relationships and the expectations we harbor for them

an internal working model is not an omnipotent fantasy, but the internalization of the individual’s relationships with others, so that these relationships become a framework for the self

The parent has anticipated the infant’s hunger, met it, and the child knows nothing of need, just desire and satisfaction. That’s infantile omnipotence. But it doesn’t last, and the task of child-rearing is to break the illusion gradually. If that’s trauma, it’s the slow, ordinary trauma of growing up.

The value of seeing trauma as the loss of the assumptive world is that it makes the loss of meaning central to trauma

Psychoanalysis is a search for the way in which we defend against the real. At the same time this search is the defense

a person who can listen without being overwhelmed

Otherwise expressed, he recognized that along with love and hate, we need to know. And to know we have to be able to think, which means being able to put thoughts together. Trauma destroys this ability, whether it happens to an infant whose mother cannot contain his bits of thought, or to an adult whose own developed ability to contain his or her associations is destroyed by trauma

Trauma

his guide is all a reader needs to get a solid handle on "what happens in Proust," "who's who" in the novel, and to understand the relevant socio-historical and biographical contexts.

About half of all whistleblowers lose their jobs. Of these, most will lose their house, their spouse, and suffer a period of drug or alcohol abuse. Most of these will never work in their profession again, though it depends on the profession.

no ancient history as far as trauma is concerned, only an endless past that is always displacing the present

Absolute Time

c)

sensory deprivation (such as in experimental isolation chambers) tends to compress the experience of time, so that minutes, hours and days seem to pass about twice as fast as usual. Time spent under these unpleasant and undeniably tedious conditions paradoxically feels shorter than normal time, and some other effect seems to be at work here

life-threatening or stressful even

dball effect”

Chronostasis

Only then can the story-telling begin.

Unlike torture, in which the torturer is in complete control, the sufferer of severe PTSD shrinks the world in order to live in a place totally under his or her control.  That is a small world indeed, generally just a room or house.  The cost of this safety, which is never really safe because the threat is within, is the loss of a world in which the traumatized one can live, love, and express himself or herself.  Without a feeling of basic safety, nothing else is of any value, nothing else can be used to enliven and enrich the self.

Only when the body’s reactivity is reduced do words stand a chance of even roughly representing experience. 

As such, it subverts our own primary experience of the world, an experience that is prior to and beyond language. 

The answer seems to be that language is always cut off from experience, not just among the traumatized, but among us all.  If so, then traumatic experience is continuous with ordinary experience.  Trauma does not operate in a parallel neurological or linguistic universe.  The difficulties the traumatized experience putting words to their experiences are exaggerated versions of everybody’s experience with language.  Trauma is uniquely painful, but the way traumatization happens is not unique, but is shared by all who speak. 

Van der Kolk [a psychiatrist and neuroscientis

testifying about an event only to be disbelieved or disregarded can be as traumatizing as the original event itself

Ford struggled academically following her sexual assault and had difficulty “forming new friendships, especially with boys,” she testified

now, in what psychoanalysis calls the après-coup, that experience gains meaning with new information and external validation. The memory of the event that was perhaps not traumatizing at the time, can later be understood as—and come to feel—traumatic.

you begin to wonder if you, too, had in fact been harassed.

What we do is move between states of differentiation and dedifferentiation.  A good life requires the ability to live with both at once.

The analyst holds and “metabolizes” unbearable experience, so that it can be reintrojected in more bearable form

That is, survivors can discover that they are not alone in their knowledge of devastation

Once subjectivity is lost, there can be little value to an inner domain of emotions and thoughts that may be given public expression in narrative (Jameson). No subject, no narrative. Or rather, no reason to believe that narrative can reflect its creator’s lived experience. It is for this reason, but not for this reason alone, that the fundamental inaccessibility of trauma to narrative is so frequently asserted.

.

We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.

Dori Laub refers to an implicit “contract” between the interviewer and the witness. For this limited time, throughout the duration of the testimony, I’ll be with you all the way, as much as I can.  I want to go wherever you go, and I’ll hold and protect you along this journey.  Then, at the end of the journey, I shall leave you.

In my case, each time someone failed to respond I felt as though I were alone again in the ravine, dying, screaming. And still no one could hear me. Or, worse, they heard me, but refused to help.

never to meet again. 

using the only means available when thinking and feeling are blocked by dissociative process: action

d."

?

environment

No unenlightened people should reproduce

spiritual torture

but all were raped in spirit"

psychological

r.

addicted to spirituality, morality and his own ideologies.

what cult leaders do also.

an enlightened person no longer uses crutches like dogma, morality, religion, spirituality, ideologies and theories to hide behind

His style is demagogic, polemic and fanatic

it comes as no surprise...if he is fortunate...he conceives....he imagines

Anyone still vulnerable that goes to him for help will be emotionally abused all over again under the mask of help, he is silently and covertly passing the psychological virus or lies his parents passed on to him, but now these lies are coated with abstract knowledge, disconnected truths he has taken from Alice Miller and others and with these lies coated with bits of truths serving as hooks to allure people to him, much like cult leaders do. I find people like that very dangerous and abusive that exploits emotionally blind people and they only contribute to creating more confusion and keeping people in the state of confusion and trapped.

he path to hell is full of good intentions

expectation to others.

a glum one

Cult of personality

Loading the Language

pparent passage of time

make sense

loss of meaning

reduce morality to psychology, or to imagine that psychology can form the basis of morality

narrative theory might link work to broader questions about identity development; metaphor theory might provide a means of viewing work as transformative in terms of its effects; and speech act theory might provide the tools by which one can see the specific objective effects of work

action as a linguistic phenomenon

one can teach a personto perform sexually, but one cannot teach him to be erotic. Thereinlies the absurdity of sex therapy

ow they prescribe it.

.

Sexuality is a misplaced lens through which we express of our desperate, anachronistic desire to have been loved fully as children

prostitution fantasy

dolescent’s vehementeffort to ‘stamp out’ t

parentalhomeostatic functions

Queer An umbrella term used by people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or other sexual or gender minorities to describe themselves; the term has been reclaimed from people who would use it as an insult against LGBT+ people

A lot of people who are not fat, or who are not disabled, don’t want to be either of those things. And so people will see us, and say ‘I don’t want to look like that, I don’t want to end up like that,’ and they project the bodies that they don’t want to have onto our bodies...”

the insight of humanism, that human beings are of value and worthy of a full and meaningful life

The idea that there is a predefined timeline to decondition and acclimate oneself to a new learning pathway is schoolish is inself

their organizing practices