Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.
It was_early_in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the_ravages of her terrible history of early abuse._One day I opened the door_to my waiting room and saw_her_standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt,_her hair dyed flaming red,_with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. __ou must be Dr. van der Kolk,_ she said. __y name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?_ I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting __ane_ and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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It was_early_in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the_ravages of her terrible history of early abuse._One day I opened the door_to my waiting room and saw_her_standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt,_her hair dyed flaming red,_with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. __ou must be Dr. van der Kolk,_ she said. __y name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?_ I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting __ane_ and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.
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Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.
Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person__ shadow is embodied in a person__ conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
On its own, my internal dissociated part now came to the surface, and I found myself hiding from everyone. I still was not connecting it to the dream I'd had. At one time I had thought I could control these sudden episodes, but I was apparently mistaken. I had grown very unsure about every facet of my mental health. A disturbed part of me was taking over and I was terrified. I began to wonder if Big Suzie would completely cease to exist.