Rose Relationship Revolution Pt 2
I would argue that most of us spend a good portion of our lives learning how to have a peaceful relationship with ourselves. Life under colonialist capitalism is inherently traumatizing.
One of the best books I’ve read on complex PTSD and its physiological ramifications is Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” published in 2014. I read it in 2019 and it catapulted me into a hard close look at my own lived experience as an autistic woman who experienced emotional abuse, sexual abuse, medical negligence, religious abuse, and extreme poverty in my childhood.
Before reading this book, I had never heard the term complex PTSD.
The book reads:
"Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable.
It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.
While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep down below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones.
This precipitates unpleasant emotions, intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming.
Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.
Research has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from the irrelevant.
We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive.
These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives.
They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience.
We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failures or signs of lack of willpower or bad character - they are caused by actual changes in the brain."
Over the next few posts I’ll be reviewing more of what I learned from this book and I encourage anyone who has been captured by the quotes I’ve shared to purchase or borrow the book for themselves.
Thanks for joining me on this discovery process. Love you guys.
