Our path involves honesty re- the challenges we face as planetary human beings.
We are faced with the strenuous task of seeing through the well-crafted business of fear that has overrun our planet. While this is often not easy, we would do well to recall that it is usual for difficult and challenging experiences to precede worthwhile achievements.
The choices we make and the risks we are willing to take now are essential to the process of strengthening our resolve and awakening to the recognition and application of our personal power re- the future.
We are being offered an opportunity to achieve a profound deepening of awareness and sensitivity - which, in turn, is giving us the option to feel, heal and deal with our personal and planetary life situations. We are challenged to create a unified-differentiated humanity and a world that works for all.
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Trauma
Trauma results from extreme events including: rape, battering, incest, other criminal assaults, the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, the sudden loss of a loved one, serious accidents, earthquakes, floods, combat and many more shocking situations. Included are technological breakdowns such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, as well as witnessing or experiencing mass atrocities such as Nazi death camps and the nuclear attacks on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What are the psychological impacts and aftermaths of such experiences? How do survivors face, work through such events, and get on with their lives?
Interestingly, the identification and treatment of psychological trauma itself has had a checkered history in being subject to episodic amnesia. This process mirrors that of an individual who has been traumatized.
Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion. In the past century, lines of inquiry have been taken up and then abruptly abandoned, only to be rediscovered years later.
Often, the subject has provoked such intense controversy that it becomes anathema. To study psychological trauma is to bear witness to horrible events and to human evil.
A breakthrough arrived with the publication of Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery.
Herman delved into the history, symptoms, treatment and recovery from traumatic events, opening up a universe of discourse for further exploration.
Herman states:
"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...
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