Trauma- the Body Never Forgets. Why Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Honesty About Trauma Matters.
The lawmaker spoke unflinchingly about how the trauma of her past sexual assault “compounded” with her experience at the Capitol. Why are some men so mad?
One of the first things experts will tell you about trauma is that the body never forgets.
The mind may move on for a time from a traumatic experience, but the minute you encounter a trigger — a smell, a threat, a verbal cue, a sound — your body goes into overdrive. Suddenly comes the shallow breathing, the heart palpitations, the fuzzy brain, the tightening of the chest, the terror that seems to animate every cell of your body. Trauma leaves “imprints on body, mind and soul,” as Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., writes in his 2015 book on trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score.”
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If I had the time and money I would walk by her side protecting her from all those creeps,
dalefvictor
Level 8
Feb 2, 2021
1
As I grew up I was beat down like Rocky by Christian parents “because” they loved me.
Well that’s what they say anyway.
When my Dad intentionally dislocated my shoulder for three minutes (timed with a stopwatch) when I was eleven for yelling at my four year old brother after he shattered my Klingon bird of prey model I’d worked on for a very long time I decided things were out of control.
Willow_Wisp
Level 8
Feb 2, 2021
7
Sorry you grew up with that, that's so wrong
That's horrible. You have my sympathy and support.
@LiterateHiker Honestly I think my father was trying to turn me into a serial killer. I’m not going to tell the worst of it. To make it worse I was also tending toward being trans as a young man which made everything worse, even though I kept it to myself for obvious reasons.
Then as I was just starting to come to grips with it out comes silence of the lambs and after seeing it I was so traumatized by Buffalo Bill I couldn’t accept that I was in the closet. Even though it’s not in me to harm anyone or anything I saw a person systematically abused as I had been that became a monster. That combined with trauma and self doubt almost kept me locked in that closet the rest of my life.
I couldn’t face myself again until I was 59.
I know exactly who I am now, and I am beautifully tragic but beautiful none the less. The monster I feared doesn’t exist and damn that writer for demonizing a natural part of the spectrum of human experience the way that they did with that movie, as if young trans people didn’t have enough to deal with already.
You have my strong support. Hugs.
It is a type of PTSD. We are the walking wounded.
HippieChick58
Level 9
Feb 2, 2021
3
Exactly.
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