Healing the Traumatized Self Quotes

“In fact, scholars have noted that many trauma survivors appear at times even to seek out their further traumatization through various self-destructive reenactments and revictimizations, perhaps akin in certain respects to a form of addiction (e.g., Briere & Runtz, 1987, 1993; Chu, 2011; Courtois, 2004; Myrick, Brand, & Putnam, 2013; van der Kolk, 1989). Assuming,”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“although those who exhibit structural division of the personality commonly exhibit altered states of consciousness, only relatively few individuals who experience altered states of consciousness also exhibit structural divisions of the personality. To clarify the distinction, Steele and colleagues preferred to reserve the terms dissociation and dissociative for instances of structural division of the personality, with altered states of consciousness instead referred to simply as such (see also Nijenhuis & van der Hart, 2011). Steel and colleagues called for further investigation of the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of both pathological alterations in consciousness and structural division of the personality. Trauma-Related”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“They pointed out that, although frequently co-occurring and confounded within any specific moment, “in theory it is simple to distinguish between the symptoms of structural dissociation and pathological fields and levels of conscious awareness: the former involves a division of the personality and the latter does not” (Steele et al., 2009, p. 160). Furthermore,”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“Following van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele’s (2006) structural theory of dissociation, a model that considers the spectrum of dissociative disorders in terms of increasing division and multiplicity within an individual’s first-person experience of agency and selfhood,”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“For example, Dell’s (2006b) Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation (MID) is a highly regarded psychometric instrument specifically designed to provide a comprehensive, content-valid assessment of the more commonly observed experiences of persons with dissociative identity disorder, many of which represent prototypic descriptions of altered states of consciousness (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, posttraumatic flashbacks, and trance states, collectively described previously by Dell [2001] as instances of “pervasive dissociation”).”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“This point notwithstanding, consistent with Holmes et al.’s (2005) emphasis in defining compartmentalization as “a deficit in the ability to deliberately control processes or actions that would normally be amenable to such control” (Holmes et al., p. 7), a particularly distressing variant of disintegrated or compartmentalized functions entails the perceived separation of will from action, that is, the dissociative compartmentalization of perceived agency. In other words, a person may experience a lack of normally expected conscious volitional control over his or her cognitive and behavioral–motor functions, with actions thus performed seemingly beyond the person’s own will. For example, a traumatized client described taking very high (though fortunately nonlethal) doses of prescription medications “against her will.” Specifically, despite her best intentions, she has frequently found that she cannot stop consuming the medication, the experience akin to her thoughts and actions seeming to be under dual control. Another traumatized client has described the experience of being without volitional control to stop acts of self-mutilation, which may, upon subsequent reflection, be understood as motivated by self-loathing and as epitomizing an act of aggression toward herself. In”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment

“For example, Dell (2009a) further explicitly asserts “that the domain of dissociative psychopathology is all of human experience. There is no human experience that is immune to invasion by the symptoms of pathological dissociation. Pathological dissociation can (and often does) affect seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, emoting, wanting, dreaming, intending, expecting, knowing, believing, recognizing, remembering, and so on” (Dell, 2009a, p. 228, emphasis in original). This”
― Paul Frewen, Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment