Judith Herman Quotes

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.

... 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.

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.

In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.

When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.

Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.

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.

It is not possible to be truly balanced in one’s views of an abuser and an abused woman. As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her masterwork Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral. Although an abuser prefers to have you wholeheartedly on his side, he will settle contentedly for your decision to take a middle stance. To him, that means you see the couple’s problems as partly her fault and partly his fault, which means it isn’t abuse.

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.

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where all questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.

The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure.

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.

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.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies. Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control. They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.

The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love. p4

First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.

when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity. Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...

Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility. To speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims…. Denial, repression and dissociation operate on a Social, as well as an individual level.

Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else. Battered women may lose their homes, their friends, and their livelihood. Survivors of childhood abuse may lose their families. Political refugees may lose their homes and their homeland. Rarely are the dimensions of this sacrifice fully recognized.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it.

Like revenge, the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture, because it remains out of reach for most ordinary human beings. Folk wisdom recognizes that to forgive is divine. And even divine forgiveness, in most religious systems, is not unconditional. True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways. She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances. And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered...

Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school.

It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival.

Most of our informants [incest survivors] remembered their mothers as weak and powerless, finding their only dignity in martyrdom.

In refusing to hide or be silenced, in insisting that rape is a public matter, and in demanding social change, survivors create their own living monument.

Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance. The therapist is called upon to bear witness to a crime. She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim. This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice.

Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connection with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological facilities that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic operations of trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. Just as these capabilities are formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships. The first principle of recovery is empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure. Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this basic principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.

Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands.

Women quickly learn that rape is only a crime in theory; in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is not set at the level of experience of women's violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

The three most common narcissistic snares are the aspirations to heal all, know all, and love all. [Quoting psychoanalysts John Maltsberger and Dan Buie]

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.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25]

I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.

...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event.

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.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery

As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.

Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relationships imaginable. It is no accident that incest occurs most often precisely in the relationship where the female is most powerless. The actual sexual encounter may be brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable; but it is always, inevitably, destructive to the child. The father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her body for affection and care which should be freely given. p4

Though all the daughters eventually succeeded in escaping from their families, they felt, even at this time of the interview (while in their 20s and 30s) that they would never be safe with their fathers, and that they would have to defend themselves as long as their fathers lived.

In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.

It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering... In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened, the victim lies, the victim exaggerates, the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

PTSD is, really, all about losing control. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize reclaiming and increasing a client’s sense of control over his or her body, mind, therapy situation, and life. Judith Herman

As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.]

It has become clear that, as Janet observed one hundred years ago, dissociation lies at the heart of the traumatic stress disorders. Studies of survivors of disasters, terrorist attacks, and combat have demonstrated that people who enter a dissociative state at the time of the traumatic event are among most likely to develop long-lasting PTSD.

Rape could be considered the signal crime of male supremacy, a pure enactment of power for its own sake.

The desire for total control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny.

Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247 Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997

For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity. There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories have blurred together. Usually, however, a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out. Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.

..[The] disclosure of the incest secret initiates a profound crisis for the family usually...the abuse has been going on for a number of years and has become an integral part of family life. Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.

President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 November 29, 2016 Dear President Obama, We are writing to express our grave concern regarding the mental stability of our President-Elect. Professional standards do not permit us to venture a diagnosis for a public figure whom we have not evaluated personally. Nevertheless, his widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office. We strongly recommend that, in preparation for assuming these responsibilities, he receive a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation by an impartial team of investigators. Sincerely, Judith Herman, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School Nanette Gartrell, M.D. Dee Mosbacher, M.D.

Though both partners may wish for reconciliation, their unspoken goals are often sharply in conflict. The abuser usually wishes to reestablish his pattern of coercive control, while the victim wishes to resist it.

Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.

For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother’s statement, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child.

For those who are the most directly victimized, the complicity and silence of bystanders—friends, relatives, and neighbors, not to mention officials of the law—feel like a profound betrayal, for this is what isolates them and abandons them to their fates.

The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community

helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy and power.

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening

In the face of common prejudices that blame survivors for whatever happened to them, they want assurances from the community that they did not deserve to be abused.

In avoiding any situations reminiscent of the past trauma, or any initiative that might involve future planning and risk, traumatized people deprive themselves of those new opportunities for successful coping that might mitigate the effect of the traumatic experience. Thus, constrictive symptoms, though they may represent an attempt to defend against overwhelming emotional states, exact a high price for whatever protection they afford. They narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects of the traumatic event.

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child…must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility…. The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory…or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.”[1]

In our system of criminal law, the state, not the victim, is actually considered the injured party, and it is the state, not the victim, that has the exclusive right to take action against a criminal offender.

Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child . . . must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility. . . . The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory . . . or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.

Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

Trauma robs the victim of a sense of power and control; the guiding principle of recovery is to restore power and control. The first task of recovery is to establish the survivor’s safety. This task takes precedence over all others, for no therapeutic workman possibly succeed if safety has not been adequately secured…

HYPERAROUSAL 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. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyerarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. Kardiner propsed that "the nucleus of the [traumatic] neurosis is physioneurosis."8 He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War-startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints-could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system. He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered "fight or flight" response to overwhelming danger.

Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a frequent choice... The father's wish, indeed his right, to continue to receive female nurturance, whatever the circumstances, is accepted without question.

This book appears at a time when public discussion of the common atrocities of sexual and domestic life has been made possible by the women’s movement, and when public discussion of the common atrocities of political life has been made possible by the movement for human rights. I expect the book to be controversial—first, because it is written from a feminist perspective; second, because it challenges established diagnostic concepts; but third and perhaps most importantly, because it speaks about horrible things, things that no one really wants to hear about.

Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school. Ideally, information on sexual abuse should be integrated into a general curriculum of sex education. In those communities where the experiment has been tried, it has been shown conclusively that children can learn what they most need to know about sexual abuse, without becoming unduly frightened or developing generally negative sexual attitudes. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example, the Hennepin County Attorney's office developed an education program on sexual assault for elementary school children. The program was presented to all age groups in four different schools, some eight hundred children in all. The presentation opened with a performance by a children’s theater group, illustrating the difference between affectionate touching, and exploitative touching. The children’s responses to the skits indicated that they understood the distinction very well indeed. Following the presentation, about one child in six disclosed a sexual experience with an adult, ranging from an encounter with an exhibitionist to involvement in incest. Most of the children, both boys and girls, had not told anyone prior to the classroom discussion. In addition to basic information on sexual relations and sexual assault, children need to know that they have the right to their own bodily integity.

certain incidents do more than just touch our raw spots or “hurt our feelings.” They injure us so deeply that they overturn our world. They are relationship traumas. In the dictionary a trauma is defined as a wound that plunges us into fear and helplessness, that challenges all our assumptions of predictability and control. Traumatic wounds are especially severe, observes Judith Herman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, when they involve a “violation of human connection.” Indeed, there is no greater trauma than to be wounded by the very people we count on to support and protect us.

As Trump marches on to the rhythm of near-daily twitter rants, daily outrages, and weekly embarrassments, it remains unimaginable—even if it is observable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the commander in chief would use twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a ‘very stable genius’ verges on the impossible. This can’t be happening. This is happening – The thought pattern of nightmares and real-life disasters has become the constant routine of tens of millions of people. Every Trump tweet, televised statement, and headline causes a form of this reaction. If the word ‘unthinkable’ had literal meaning, this would be it: thinking about it makes the mind misfire; it makes one want to stop thinking. It brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: ‘certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,’ she once wrote. ‘This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.’ The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. It is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy, and the restrained tone of the media compounds this feeling by failing to acknowledge it.

Survivors do not want their injuries to be trivialized or ridiculed, and they do not want to be blamed for them. They do not want to be dismissed as overly emotional or told to “get over it.” They want their communities to recognize and respect their suffering and to acknowledge the seriousness of the harm they have endured.

While in principle groups for survivors are a good idea, in practice it soon becomes apparent that to organize a successful group is no simple matter. Groups that start out with hope and promise can dissolve acrimoniously, causing pain and disappointment to all involved. The destructive potential of groups is equal to their therapeutic promise. The role of the group leader carries with it a risk of the irresponsible exercise of authority. Conflicts that erupt among group members can all too easily re-create the dynamics of the traumatic event, with group members assuming the roles of perpetrator, accomplice, bystander, victim, and rescuer. Such conflicts can be hurtful to individual participants and can lead to the group’s demise. In order to be successful, a group must have a clear and focused understanding of its therapeutic task and a structure that protects all participants adequately against the dangers of traumatic reenactment. Though groups may vary widely in composition and structure, these basic conditions must be fulfilled without exception. Commonality with other people carries with it all the meanings of the word common. It means belonging to a society, having a public role, being part of that which is universal. It means having a feeling of familiarity, of being known, of communion. It means taking part in the customary, the commonplace, the ordinary, and the everyday. It also carries with it a feeling of smallness, or insignificance, a sense that one’s own troubles are ‘as a drop of rain in the sea.’ The survivor who has achieved commonality with others can rest from her labors. Her recovery is accomplished; all that remains before her is her life.

For most of the twentieth century, it was the study of combat veterans that led to the development of a body of knowledge about traumatic disorders. Not until the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are not those of men in war but of women in civilian life. The real conditions of women's lives were hidden in the sphere of the personal, in private life. The cherished value of privacy created a powerful barrier to consciousness and rendered women's reality practically invisible. To speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life was to invite public humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief. Women were silenced by fear and shame, and the silence of women gave license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation. Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life. It was difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home.

Violence does not need to be used very often; it merely needs to be convincing when it is used.

When men see themselves in power they think that they deserve everything,

the suffering of traumatized people is a matter not only of individual psychology but also, always, of social justice.

Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor.

Consider these words from Judith Herman: “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”[1]

David Abrams’s Fobbit, Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, Omnia Amin and Rick London’s translations of Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi’s poetry, Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well, Donovan Campbell’s Joker One, C. J. Chivers’s The Gun, Seth Connor’s Boredom by Day, Death by Night, Daniel Danelo’s Blood Stripes, Kimberly Dozier’s Breathing the Fire, Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone, Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, Jim Frederick’s Black Hearts, Matt Gallagher’s Kaboom, Jessica Goodell’s Shade It Black, J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, Dave Grossman’s On Killing and On Combat, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Kirsten Holmstedt’s Band of Sisters, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, Colum McCann’s Dancer, Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam, Roy Scranton’s essays and fiction, the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction Report Hard Lessons, Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe and No True Glory, Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More Than You.

If traumatic disorders are afflictions of the powerless, then empowerment must be a central principle of recovery. If trauma shames and isolates, then recovery must take place in community.

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: “His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients.” If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O. After Breuer abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman... Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit.

The U.S. legal system is organized as an adversarial contest: in civil cases, between two citizens; in criminal cases, between a citizen and the state. Physical violence and intimidation are not allowed in court, whereas aggressive argument, selective presentation of the facts, and psychological attack are permitted, with the presumption that this ritualized, hostile encounter offers the best method of arriving at the truth.

In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem. The combat veteran Tim O'Brien describes this pervasive sense of doubt: '... There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.' ...

Fragmentation in the inner representations of the self prevents the integration of identity. Fragmentation in the inner representations of others prevents the development of a reliable sense of independence within connection.

Men as Victims: Challenging Cultural Myths Judith Herman’s recent treatise on “complex PTSD" (Herman, 1992) is an extremely articulate and compelling analysis of some of the failings of the current PTSD diagnosis, and of some of the psychological legacies of prolonged, repeated trauma. However, there was one aspect of the article which concerned me and which I wish to address. Throughout the article, "Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma," whenever reference is made by pronoun to perpetrators or "captors," the pronoun "he" or "him' is used. There are four such references. Whenever reference is made by pronoun to victims or survivors, the pronoun "her" or "she" is used. There are 11 such references. This is not simply an issue of the use of sexist language, which it is. By uniformly linking perpetration with males and victimhood with females, a misconception is perpetuated, one that is shared by the public and by mental health professionals. While there is evidence that most perpetrators of sexual abuse are male, and that there are more female victims of sexual abuse than male victims, it is not true that all perpetrators are male and all victims are female. In fact, in the article, some of the traumas from which Dr. Herman was deriving her argument—political torture, concentration camp survivors, for example—affect as many males as females. Even in the case of sexual abuse, there is increasing evidence that the sexual abuse of males is far more prevalent than has heretofore been believed. Research on male sexual victimization lags more than a decade behind that of female victimization, but several recent studies have reported prevalence rates near or above 20% (Finkelhor et at, 1990; Urquiza, 1988, cited in Urquiza and Keating, 1990; Lisak and Luster, 1992).

Authoritarian, secretive, sometimes grandiose, and even paranoid, the perpetrator is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive to the realities of power and to social norms. Only rarely does he get into difficulties with the law; rather, he seeks out situations where his tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired. His demeanor provides an excellent camouflage, for few people believe that extraordinary crimes can be committed by men of such conventional appearance.

Some extraordinary survivors, recognizing that their suffering is part of a much larger social problem, are able to transform the meaning of their trauma by making their stories a gift to others and by joining with others to seek a better world.

But I'd begun, slowly, to understand that complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or cPTSD, was different. It was particularly difficult to treat, because - like a flat landscape - it didn't offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with. Complex post-traumatic stress, according to the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, is the result of 'prolonged, repeated trauma,' rather than individual traumatic events. It's what happens when you're born into a world, shaped by a world, where there's no safety, ever. When the people who should take care of you are, instead, scary and unreliable, and when you live years and years without the belief that escape is possible. When you come from a world like this, when all your muscles are trained to tension and suspicion, normal life feels unbearable. It doesn't make sense, getting up, going to class, eating lunch, returning home, sleeping. You don't trust it. It doesn't feel real. And unreality can hurt more than pain.

Therapy requires a collaborative working relationship in which both partners act on the basis of their implicit confidence in the value and efficacy of persuasion rather than coercion, ideas rather than force, mutuality rather than authoritarian control.

Most people have no understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh. The chronically abused person's apparent helplessness and passivity, her entrapment in the past, her intractable depression and somatic complaints, and her smoldering anger often frustrate the people closest to her. Moreover, if she has been coerced into betrayal of relationships, community loyalties, or moral values, she is frequently subjected to furious condemnation. Observers who have never experienced prolonged terror and who have no understanding of coercive methods of control presume that they would show greater courage and resistance than the victim in similar circumstances. Hence the common tendency to account for the victim's behavior by seeking flaws in her personality or moral character. ... The propensity to fault the character of the victim can be seen even in the case of politically organized mass murder. The aftermath of the Holocaust witnessed a protracted debate regarding the 'passivity' of the Jews and their 'complicity' in their fate. But the historian Lucy Dawidowicz points out that 'complicity' and 'cooperation' are terms that apply to situations of free choice. They do not have the same meaning in situations of captivity.

Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. […] It results in the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes.

Bearing witness takes the courage to realize the potential of the human spirit. Witnessing requires us to call forth the highest qualities of our species, qualities such as conviction, integrity, empathy, and compassion. It is easier by far to retain the attributes of carnistic culture: apathy, complacency, self-interest, and "blissful" ignorance. I wrote this book––itself an act of witnessing––because I believe that, as humans, we have a fundamental desire to strive to become our best selves. I believe that each and every one of us has the capacity to act as powerful witnesses in a world very much in need. I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of individuals through my work as a teacher, author, and speaker, and through my personal life. I have witnessed, again and again, the courage and compassion of the so-called average American: previously apathetic students who become impassioned activists; lifelong carnists who weep openly when exposed to images of animal cruelty, never again to eat meat; butchers who suddenly connect meat to its living source and become unable to continue killing animals; and a community of carnists who aid a runaway cow in her flight from slaughter. Ultimately, bearing witness requires the courage to take sides. In the face of mass violence, we will inevitably fall into a role: victim or perpetrator. Judith Herman argues that all bystanders are forced to take a side, by their action or inaction, and that their is no such thing as moral neutrality. Indeed, as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel points out, "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." Witnessing enables us to choose our role rather than having one assigned to us. And although those of us who choose to stand with the victim may suffer, as Herman says, "There can be no greater honor.

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective. This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help.

Prior to any form of action, however, survivors wish for moral vindication. They want bystanders to take a stand, recognize that a wrong has been done, and unambiguously denounce the crime. In the face of common prejudices that blame survivors for whatever happened to them, they want assurances from the community that they did not deserve to be abused. They want the burden of shame lifted from their shoulders and placed on the shoulders of the perpetrators, where it belongs.

Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy.

In criminal court, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. These two cornerstones of criminal law, the presumption of innocence and the requirement of a very high standard of proof, are designed to tip the scales of justice in favor of criminal defendants, in recognition of the tremendous imbalance of power between individual citizens and the state. But no equivalent consideration is given to the safety and well-being of crime victims who bear witness in court, despite the very real imbalance of power that so often obtains between victim and perpetrator.

In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality. These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action: Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S. Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home. I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S. On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S. On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday. On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends. On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five.

Feelings of rage and murderous revenge fantasies are normal responses to abusive treatment. Like abused adults, abused children are often rageful and sometimes aggressive. They often lack verbal and social skills for resolving conflict, and they approach problems with the expectation of hostile attack. The abused child’s predictable difficulties in modulating anger further strengthen her conviction of inner badness. Each hostile encounter convinces her that she is indeed a hateful person. If, as is common, she tends to displace her anger far from its dangerous source and to discharge it unfairly on those who did not provoke it, her self-condemnation is aggravated still further.

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma," Judith Lewis Herman asserts. The child becomes "fixated," or developmentally arrested at the age at which the trauma occurred, and even as an adult is stuck in a time warp of childlike helplessness. She continues to process emotions with a child's intensity and mobilizes only those defenses that were available to her at the time of the trauma. Rather than blame others for her problems, she views her pain through the magical thinking of childhood, convinced that she is responsible not only for what happened to her as a kid but all the subsequent problems that have befallen her. "Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality," writes Herman in her 1992 book "Trauma and Recovery".

In 1974 Freedman and Kaplan’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry stated that “incest is extremely rare, and does not occur in more than 1 out of 1.1 million people.”16 As we have seen in chapter 2 this authoritative textbook then went on to extol the possible benefits of incest: “Such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world. . . . The vast majority of them were none the worse for the experience.” How misguided those statements were became obvious when the ascendant feminist movement, combined with awareness of trauma in returning combat veterans, emboldened tens of thousands of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and rape to come forward. Consciousness-raising groups and survivor groups were formed, and numerous popular books, including The Courage to Heal (1988), a best-selling self-help book for survivors of incest, and Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1992), discussed the stages of treatment and recovery in great detail.

There are those who still hold out hope that this president can be prevailed upon to listen to reason and curb his erratic behavior. Our professional experience would suggest otherwise; witness the numerous submissions we have received for this volume while organizing a Yale conference in April 2017 entitled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?”3 Collectively with our coauthors, we warn that anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency. Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

For this reason, repairing the harms of tyranny first of all requires bystanders and the larger community to recognize their own moral responsibility and to take action in solidarity with those who have been harmed. They must find the courage to seek out and acknowledge the truth, to overcome their fear and cynicism, to denounce the crimes of tyranny, and to ally with survivors in the name of human dignity. It is this reconciliation with the larger community that many survivors seek when they speak of justice.

Las atrocidades (...) no se dejan enterrar. (...) En las tradiciones populares abundan los fantasmas que se niegan a descansar en sus tumbas hasta que no se dan a conocer sus historias. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (Trauma y recuperación)

Tyrannical regimes also cultivate attitudes of cynicism, indifference, and narrow egotism among the general public, encouraging people to look out for their own skins only and to look the other way when their neighbors are hurt. By undermining any sense of community or the common good, the rulers keep their subordinate populations isolated and under control. These regimes also foster corruption, on both a petty and grand scale, implicitly encouraging people to seek whatever advantage they can over their fellow citizens.

Anger is a most unwelcome sentiment from the crime victims whom the dominant community would most prefer to ignore. The victim's passionate indignation is commonly perceived as a disruptive force, disturbing the peace and comfort of the bystanders who are called upon to redress the victim's wrongs.

When groups who have been victimized organize to call attention to the violence directed at them, they have been historically vilified as "troublemakers" and persecuted on suspicion of desire to subvert the social order by means of violence.

Retributive anger—what I would call blind rage or humiliated fury—is what people feel when they are alone and abandoned to their fates. The wish to retaliate is born of isolation and helplessness.

In the case of rape, the presumption of innocence for the accused often translates into a simple presumption that the accuser is lying, and victims often feel that they, rather than the perpetrators, are on trial.

Basic trust is the foundation of belief in the continuity of life, the order of nature, and the transcendent order of the divine. In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection... for their mothers, or for God. When this cry is not answered... people feel utterly... alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life.

Recovery [from trauma] can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

,,The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness (...) Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried". ,,Filk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told". ,,The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma". ,,When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery".

justice is a moral concept that requires a moral community for its enactment, and I argue that relationships of dominance and subordination are incompatible with justice, which must be based on principles of trust and fairness that are found only in relationships of mutuality.

Unlike fear, shame is a social emotion, a signal of threat not to life but to human connection. It is a response to rejection, ridicule, or ostracism.

Faced with a tyrant’s constant barrage of lies, gaslighting, and propaganda, many ordinary people will simply tune out. When seeking the truth becomes too dangerous or just too exhausting, it is tempting simply to retreat from any form of public engagement, focusing only on the narrowest private concerns. The more ordinary people withdraw their attention from the public sphere, the more the tyrant gains in his claim to absolute power, not merely over the law but over truth itself.

Those who live under the rules of tyranny are thus faced with a range of possibilities as bystanders. They can choose to become accomplices and followers of the tyrant and gain the benefits of active collusion in a corrupt system; they can become silent witnesses who are aware of abuses of power but keep quiet out of fear or indifference; or they can simply retreat into a stance of unknowing, feeling that they are powerless to make a difference in any event. All these levels of collusion can be rationalized as just “going along to get along,” simply accepting that this is the way the world is. One can sympathize with the dilemma of bystanders, for few will have the courage to seek out the truth, to speak up, or to intervene on behalf of victims, knowing the kinds of punishments they may risk themselves. It is only too easy to say, “It’s none of my business, and anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Historian Michael Rothberg has coined the term “implicated subjects” for those who are neither perpetrators nor victims but should not simply be considered “passive bystanders” because they benefit, knowingly or not, from the oppression of others, and their actions, or failure to act, help to perpetuate the social structures of inequality. Implicated subjects, in Rothberg’s view, can be part of a “transmission belt of domination.” Even if ignorant of the violent crimes and the methods of coercive control that perpetuate the rules of tyranny, they are morally compromised because they enjoy privileges derived indirectly from the subordination of others. Therefore, even if not directly involved as witnesses, they share in the social responsibility for making things right. “‘Modes of implication’—entanglements in historical and present-day injustices—are complex, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory,” he writes, “but are nonetheless essential to confront in the pursuit of justice.

For those who are the most directly victimized, the complicity and silence of bystanders—friends, relatives, and neighbors, not to mention officials of the law—feel like a profound betrayal, for this is what isolates them and abandons them to their fates. Survivors can perhaps accept the fact that some people are predators or psychopaths who seek absolute power.

Once bystanders begin to take a righteous stand in support of survivors, the power of the tyrant begins to crumble. For this reason, repairing the harms of tyranny first of all requires bystanders and the larger community to recognize their own moral responsibility and to take action in solidarity with those who have been harmed. They must find the courage to seek out and acknowledge the truth, to overcome their fear and cynicism, to denounce the crimes of tyranny, and to ally with survivors in the name of human dignity. It is this reconciliation with the larger community that many survivors seek when they speak of justice.

Everyone has an equal voice. Everyone is entitled to respect and care. Power and responsibility are shared. Decisions are made by mutual consent and compromise. Disputes are resolved through negotiation. Relationships are governed by principles of trust and fairness and bounded by the rule of law. All members of the community share a commitment to the common good and to certain inalienable rights. Under these rules, ideally, there are only winners; everyone stands to gain freedom, prosperity, and safety.

Our legal system was not designed initially to redress the harms done to women or to enslaved or Indigenous people. Often, in fact, it has been an active instrument of those harms. So perhaps it is not surprising that both women and the descendants of enslaved peoples remain to this day deeply alienated from the legal system.

The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening.

When groups who have been victimized organize to call attention to the violence directed at them, they have been historically vilified as “troublemakers” and persecuted on suspicion of desire to subvert the social order by means of violence. This was true a century ago in the labor movement, it was true sixty years ago in the civil rights movement, and it is true again today.

George Orwell explains, “Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act, which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

When the community rallies to the victim’s support, vengeful feelings are transformed into shared righteous indignation, which can be a powerful source of energy for repair. It is only when victims are denied their fair measure of justice that their anger can fester as helpless rage.

resentment and indignation are in fact valid feelings that deserve social recognition and respect. He recognizes that this passion can be excessive, but then, he argues, what passion cannot?

the capacity to feel indignation on behalf of others is the basis of an important social bond. Rather than as a toxic passion that ought to be suppressed, he views resentment and indignation as a potential source of empathy and connection. He explains that people are capable of reacting with indignation not only when their own honor is violated but also when they witness the dishonoring of others. These “shared sentiments,” according to Williams, “serve to bind people together in a community of feeling.”14

Different things are valued in different cultures; but whatever is valued, women are not that. If bottom is bottom, look across time and space, and women are whom you will find there. —Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified

When the abuser is the very person on whom the child depends for care and protection, she learns from an early age that people who claim to love her are going to hurt her and that being hurt is the price of love. Such early violations of trust and safe attachment damage the formation of a coherent sense of self, embodied in space, continuous in time, and deserving of love.

Many are determined that the “cycle of abuse” will stop with them. For many, this will be the only kind of justice within their power to achieve. Any form of accountability for their abusers will remain out of reach.

Prosecutors also tend to decline cases of date rape or acquaintance rape, which comprise the majority of cases, when victims do not fit the stereotypical image of “innocence”—that is, they are not young, white, blond, demure, and virginal. They will rationalize this choice on the grounds that juries will be prejudiced against all but the most “perfect” victims.

What survivors need from their communities is a commitment to listen to their stories with an open mind and with care and compassion rather than skepticism and scorn.

the lessons of male entitlement: the timeless rules of patriarchy. Though she equaled her “brothers” in courage and shared their dangers, her body was still to be at their disposal.

Like so many survivors, she has made meaning of her story by making it a gift to others, hoping to heal not only herself but also other survivors and even, perhaps, to bend a complicit institution toward justice.

This kind of letting go cannot be achieved simply by an act of will, however. Emotionally, it is quite different from the immediate, spontaneous, and liberating feeling of forgiveness that many people experience in response to a genuine expression of remorse. To arrive at this unilateral type of forgiveness requires a period of active grieving for everything that has been lost and all the harms that cannot be repaired. Survivors sometimes describe this process as letting go of all their own self-blame and finally forgiving themselves, besides letting go of their anger at the perpetrator. As Mary Walsh, a survivor of domestic violence, put it, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.

If no one’s punishment leads to My salvation, then accountability is what waits. —Jericho Brown, “Inaugural

The betrayal by bystanders can take many forms and can be especially painful in movements for social justice, where participants aspire to solidarity and “beloved community” but where patriarchal customs run deep. For this reason many feminists have expressed reservations about adapting RJ processes for crimes of violence against women. When community norms and beliefs are as divided and contentious as they are at present on matters of gender and power, it is hard to trust that community-based justice alternatives will be any more effective than the conventional justice system in addressing gender-based violence.

It’s so painful to listen to the suffering; people would rather ignore it.

It is not just that ‘traumatic events’ disrupt ‘attachments of family, friendship, love, and community’ or ‘shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others.’ More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very ‘systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community.’ Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones ‘that cannot be assimilated with the victim’s “inner schemata” of self in relation to the world.’ The ‘work of reconstruction,’ Herman writes, ‘actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor’s life story.

They observed that the strongest protection against psychological breakdown was the morale and leadership of the small fighting unit.

these men were actually afraid of her. “They are so afraid of women’s justified anger, the names they’re going to be called. They’re so ashamed. They can’t face it,

Too often, Black men are tried, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms for the same crimes that white men commit with no legal consequences whatsoever. The pernicious racist and patriarchal fantasy of Black assault on “pure white womanhood,” a fantasy that incited lynch mobs in the past, still animates the public today. In those rare instances when a Black stranger attacks a white woman, the state spares no energy in hunting down and punishing the offender. But in reality most rapists are not strangers to their victims; they are acquaintances, bosses, dates, boyfriends, or husbands. Most men who rape white women in the United States are white. As we saw in Chapter 3, their odds of being caught or punished are close to nil.

One might consider perpetrators of gender-based violence for the most part as opportunistic offenders; that is, they would be much less likely to commit these crimes if they didn’t have very good reason to believe that they would never be held accountable.

Psychological trauma is an alliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities.

Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child…must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility…. The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory…or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.

Title IX disciplinary actions almost as rare as criminal convictions for sexual assault. Rowan Frost, who directs the Sexual Health, Advocacy and Relationship Education program at Reed College, estimates that if the school has one hundred sexual assaults per year, twenty to forty will be reported, three to five will go through a disciplinary hearing, and one to two students will be disciplined.25 Paradoxically, however, while narrowing the official definition of what “counts” as sexual assault or harassment may have discouraged official Title IX investigations, it has opened the door for more informal and creative ways of responding to sexual misconduct that doesn’t fit within the narrowed guidelines.

Now, according to the US Department of Labor, white, non-Hispanic women earn on average 79 percent of what white, non-Hispanic men earn. Black women earn 63 percent, and Hispanic women earn 55 percent.6 That would be one metric of progress. At this rate, white women might achieve parity by 2070 or thereabouts, and Black women, fifty years later.

Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, was known to say, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

Justice, in this radical vision, means nothing less than an end to patriarchal and racist systems of dominance and subordination, revealing the violence at their heart and repairing their profound harms.

Nevertheless, as in other situations where impunity is threatened, advocates for the perpetrators mobilized politically to expand the rights of the accused under what I have named the narrative of the Fine Young Man. This is another version of the familiar tactic of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): What happened was sex, not rape. She asked for it. She is a slut. She is crazy. Or maybe she’s just out for revenge because he dropped her, and everyone knows that hell hath no fury, and so forth. The true victim is the Fine Young Man, whose life is about to be ruined by this “witch hunt.” Of course, in this instance the witches are supposedly doing the hunting, which would be a historic first, but never mind.

Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child…must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility…. The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory…or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.”[

The survivor who has accomplished her recovery faces life with few illusions but often with gratitude. Her view of life may be tragic, but for that very reason she has learned to cherish laughter. She has a clear sense of what is important and what is not. Having encountered evil, she knows how to cling to what is good. Having encountered the fear of death, she knows how to celebrate life.

It's frightening to need someone so much and not be able to control them.

determination. In the words of world-leading trauma expert Judith Herman, “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that we do nothing. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”22 If we flinch and decide that’s too hard, domestic abuse

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood establishing independence and intimacy burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.” ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Back to frameworks. One of the best frameworks for understanding how the brain heals from trauma comes from Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery.

Safety allows the survivor to recover from the terror that reduced her to abject submission and to regain a sense of agency. A sense of having some control and choice in daily life is in turn a prerequisite for further recovery. This is why even well-intentioned interventions by police and agents of the justice system can cause further harm when they take power and control away from the survivor and why legal interventions that respect and empower survivors are a just and healing way to make amends for the harms they have suffered.

I argue that relationships of dominance and subordination are incompatible with justice, which must be based on principles of trust and fairness that are found only in relationships of mutuality.

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, transforms the Furies from persecuting monsters into Eumenides (kindly ones) by including rather than banishing them.

If traumatic disorders are afflictions of the powerless, then empowerment must be a central principle of recovery.

What about those who are tasked with implementing justice but instead ally themselves with the powerful? Often, survivors will feel the bitterness of these betrayals more deeply even than the direct harms inflicted by perpetrators.

If most of the people who either write or are charged with enforcing our laws equate rape with sex rather than violence, and sex is considered a male need and not to be challenged, then rape… will continue being a crime for which there are few consequences. Instead, rape and sexual assault are framed as accidents, misunderstandings, and the fantasies of women (and children) who don’t understand the rules they must live by, including the rule that the perpetrator must be given a pass.23

La respuesta habitual a las atrocidades es borrarlas de la conciencia. Ciertas violaciones de! orden social son demasiado terribles como para pronunciarlas en voz alta: ese es el significado de la palabra impronun~ ciable.

La respuesta habitual a las atrocidades es borrarlas de la conciencia. Ciertas violaciones de! orden social son demasiado terribles como para pronunciarlas en voz alta: ese es el significado de la palabra impronunciable.

Rather than focusing on the individual pathology of offenders, MSV diagnoses violence against women as an inevitable consequence of patriarchal systems that define manhood as dominance and expands its programming from batterer intervention to community action. It argues that batterer intervention programs alone, while a necessary first step, will never be sufficient to address the problem, first, because most domestic violence is never reported to law enforcement and, second, because the burden of arrest and court-mandated treatment falls disproportionately on working-class men and men of color, while men with the most privilege are never held to account.

Most importantly, MSV conceives of domestic violence as a problem for the entire social system that effectively condones it rather than simply for the individuals involved.

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning. —JUDITH HERMAN, TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

Patients at times insist upon plunging into graphic, detailed descriptions of their traumatic experiences, in the belief that simply pouring out the story will solve all their problems. At the root of this belief is the fantasy of a violent cathartic cure which will get rid of the trauma once and for all. The patient may imagine a kind of sadomasochistic orgy, in which she will scream, cry, vomit, bleed, die, and be reborn cleansed of the trauma. The therapist’s role in this reenactment comes uncomfortably close to that of the perpetrator, for she is invited to rescue the patient by inflicting pain. The patient’s desire for this kind of quick and magical cure is fueled by images of early, cathartic treatments of traumatic symptoms which by now pervade popular culture, as well as by the much old religious metaphor of exorcism.

Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. — Judith Herman

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

In states of high sympathetic nervous system arousal, the linguistic encoding of memory is inactivated, and the central nervous system reverts to the sensory and iconic forms of memory that predominate in early life.

Adults as well as children often feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or in disguised form. Sometimes people reenact the traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter. In their attempts to undo the traumatic moment, survivors may even put themselves at risk of further harm.

Traumatic symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of their own.

I now welcomed summer visits to relatives; they were reprieves from his relentless attention. Still, when I was home, I sought out that attention as avidly as ever. My need to please him and to receive the emotional reassurance he was willing to give me in return was so much greater than the uneasiness I felt. When his strange, cooing voice bothered me, the tenderness of his words erased my misgivings. When he touched my breasts, comparing them favorably to Mother's, my qualms were quieted by the comfort his gentleness gave me. This man, the one beside me in bed, was so much nicer than the exacting, austere authority who stalked about in the other rooms of the house, or the torpid figure who sat rocking for hours at a time, staring into space. Who wouldn't want to make this man appear as often as possible?