Trauma...How Nightmares, Margaret Atwood, Judith Lewis Herman...

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There is a Man in My Window: How Nightmares, Margaret Atwood ...
.Excerpt:December 17, 2013 · by Leita Crossfield · in Military/PTSD issues. ·
“You are one voice./ It’s come down to you./ You know two things./ Much of what you say won’t be heard./ Much of what you say will hit home.” – Barry Grimes, For the Editorial Page, for Leita.
“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.” – Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
...Understanding the connection to my anxiety and hypnogognic hallucinations in light of Atwood’s fictional accounts is where Herman’s work comes in.


Through facts and examples, Herman offers an explanation for Grace Mark’s behavior which today we know as post-traumatic stress disorder. Considered a pioneer in the study of post-traumatic stress disorder, Herman helped create the standard for this disorder for The Psychiatric Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, V. In a recent interview at UC Berkeley for the “Conversations with History,” segment, moderator Harry Kreisler explains Herman’s background and work when he introduced her. “Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. (is) Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, MA. Her fields of research are the psychology of women, child abuse and domestic violence, and post-traumatic disorders.” In addition, in this interview, Herman explains how her parents, who were children of Jewish immigrants, influenced her. “My father became a professor of classics, my mother became a psychologist – I think they instilled what I would call Enlightenment values or progressive values in their children.” Since my grandmother is Jewish this information about Herman provides another link to her that I resonate with. Like my early mentor Mr. Grimes, Herman also credits a mentor early in her life who helped her develop ideas that would spark her career....My Note: Often those 'conversations with history' turn out to be our own 'history'...                  [...]

Two sides of the same coin...'murderous tyranny'...

Excerpt:

`As Bleak and Changeless As an Old Gray Rock'

That the greatest of American autobiographies – Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, and Witness by Whittaker Chambers – should be written by men with painful, first-hand experience of Communism is hardly surprising. No force so dominated the last century and claimed so many lives as the savage messianism of Marx and his disciples. From cretin to genius, even the most privileged and protected among us were touched. Take Nabokov: After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family fled St. Petersburg and found refuge in Crimea. In April 1919, they settled in England. A year later they moved to Berlin, where Nabokov’s father was assassinated in 1922. In 1937, the novelist, his wife and son moved to France, fleeing the fascist twin of Communism, and in 1940 to the United States for what he called the “spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America.” In a 1964 interview Nabokov outlined his “political creed”: 

“The fact that since my youth--I was 19 when I left Russia--my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters.” 

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We Are One: Out side my comfort zone.....

We Are One: Out side my comfort zone.....

Mary Cole-Stock Something I've been pondering as of late: "More often than not, our greatest blessings from God are found outside our comfort zone...

Abbey Roads: Art for Sunday

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